Music and Lyrics Interactions and their Influence on Recognition of Sung Words: An Investigation of Word Frequency, Rhyme, Metric Stress, Vocal Timbre, Melisma, and Repetition Priming

Johnson, Randolph; Huron, David; Collister, Lauren

doi:10.18061/emr.v9i1.3729

Cited by 29 publications

(26 citation statements)

References 13 publications

(27 reference statements)

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“…While Johnson et al (2014) observe in their conclusion that only half their predictions were upheld, and three findings were statistically significantly in the wrong direction, as it were, there is in my view no need to be apologetic about this. As they say, it was an exploratory study, and for this reason they justify establishing an alpha level of 0.1 for their statistical tests.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 71%

“…THE study reported by Johnson, et al (2014) is a follow-up to Collister and Huron's (2008) investigation of the intelligibility of sung text in English. To summarize the background to that study, Smith and Scott (1980) and Benolken and Swanson (1990) reported that listeners find it hard to distinguish between different vowels when sung at high pitch by a trained soprano.…”

Section: Abstract: Singing Words Recognition Commentarymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…

ABSTRACT: This document provides a brief commentary on Johnson, Huron and Collister's (2014) article entitled "Music and lyrics interactions and their influence on recognition of sung words: An investigation of word frequency, rhyme, metric stress, vocal timbre and repetition priming." The commentary is written from the point of view of someone who is not only a fellow researcher in the field, but also a former professional singer and singing teacher.

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confidence: 99%

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The Influence of Interactions Between Music and Lyrics: What Factors Underlie the Intelligibility of Sung Text?

Ginsborg¹

2013

EMR

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This document provides a brief commentary on Johnson, Huron and Collister's (2014) article entitled "Music and lyrics interactions and their influence on recognition of sung words: An investigation of word frequency, rhyme, metric stress, vocal timbre and repetition priming." The commentary is written from the point of view of someone who is not only a fellow researcher in the field, but also a former professional singer and singing teacher. It begins by summarizing a previous study by two of the authors and the research of two further teams of investigators in the field. It concludes by focusing on each of the authors' eight hypotheses, findings and discussion in turn.Submitted 2013 June 13; accepted 2013 July 22. KEYWORDS: singing, words, recognition, commentaryTHE study reported by Johnson, et al. (2014) is a follow-up to Collister and Huron's (2008) investigation of the intelligibility of sung text in English. To summarize the background to that study, Smith and Scott (1980) and Benolken and Swanson (1990) reported that listeners find it hard to distinguish between different vowels when sung at high pitch by a trained soprano. Hollien, Mendes-Schwartz and Nielsen (2000) showed that even voice teachers, phoneticians and speech pathology students found it hard to identify vowels correctly when trained singers -male as well as female -sang too high, i.e. when the fundamental frequency of the voice reaches or exceeds the first formant. Collister and Huron reported that, in their study, listeners (neither expert musicians nor singers) had greater difficulty understanding sung text. Listeners were found mishearing more than seven times as many words when compared to spoken text. Three-quarters of the errors involved consonants. Collister and Huron noted that when listeners did not identify vowels correctly, they tended to hear monophthongs as diphthongs or, more often, confuse them with central vowels (for those who are not expert in linguistics, these -in addition to the example Johnson et al. give of hearing "beat" as "bet" -can be found at http://web.ku.edu/~cmed/ipafolder/vowels.html). A HOT TOPICSung text intelligibility is currently something of a "hot" topic. To declare an interest: I am a member of another research team working in this field. Our starting point was, unsurprisingly, our own experiences of finding it hard to understand sung text, particularly when performed by unamplified opera singers as opposed to those using amplification, as in musical theatre, or performing operettas, such as those by the English Victorians Gilbert and Sullivan without amplification. First, we asked listeners, regardless of their musical background, for their views on the factors underlying intelligibility, or the lack of it (Fine & Ginsborg, 2007a). Next, partly on the basis of our own experience as singers and singing teachers, as well as Hollien et al.'s (2000) findings, we asked other singers and singing teachers for their views (Fine & Ginsborg, 2007b).Responses to our questionnaire informed the design...

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 71%

Section: Abstract: Singing Words Recognition Commentarymentioning

confidence: 99%

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confidence: 99%

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The Influence of Interactions Between Music and Lyrics: What Factors Underlie the Intelligibility of Sung Text?

Ginsborg¹

2013

EMR

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“…There is evidence that native speakers of (probably standard American) English find stress-matched text settings more intelligible than stress-mismatched text settings (Gordon, Magne, & Large, 2011;Johnson, Huron, & Collister, 2014).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Musical Impact of Multicultural London English (MLE) Speech Rhythm

2017

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THERE IS EVIDENCE THAT AN EMERGING VARIETY OFEnglish spoken by young Londoners-Multicultural London English (MLE)-has a more even syllable rhythm than Southern British English (SBE). Given findings that native language rhythm influences the production of musical rhythms and text setting, we investigated possible musical consequences of this development. We hypothesized that the lower vocalic durational variability in MLE and (putatively) less salient stress distinctions would go along with a preference by MLE speakers for lower melodic durational variability and a higher tolerance for stress mismatches (the non-coincidence of stress/beat strong-weak patterns) compared to SBE speakers. An analysis of two popchart song corpora by MLE and SBE artists confirmed that durational variability was lower in the MLE songs, and that there were more stress mismatches. In a follow-up experiment, MLE and SBE participants read four short English sentences and then rated text settings in pairs of specially constructed song fragments with and without stress mismatches. MLE participants' speech showed the expected lower variability in vocalic duration and syllabic prominence compared to SBE participants' speech, while their text setting ratings showed a greater tolerance of stress mismatches.

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“…However, it is also true that there are spontaneous spoken utterances that can sound as if they were sung. At first glance it seems difficult to unravel the phenomena that are common in both song and speech, but a reasonable number of scholars have already compared speech and music regarding memory, melody perception, intelligibility, rhythm and intonation [1,2,3,4,5,6]. Although these studies reveal differences between musical and speech elements, they shed light on the interplay between pitch and rhythm.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Acoustic distinctions between speech and singing: Is singing acoustically more stable than speech?

Medeiros¹,

Cabral²

2018

Speech Prosody 2018

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In this paper we study how spoken and sung versions of the same text differ in terms of the variability in duration and pitch. These two modalities are usually studied separately and few works can be found in the literature that report results about the comparison of their acoustic properties. In this work, recordings of both speech and singing of Brazilian Portuguese popular songs were conducted. Then, the variability was measured by statistical analysis of the fundamental frequency and speech rate, specifically the mean and variance. In a first study this was done at the syllable and sentence levels and latter at the phone level for further analysis. In general, results show that speech and singing variability cannot be differentiated in terms of the variance. We expected different results because singing is more constrained than speech both in terms of pitch (small variation within the note) and duration (metrical constraint). It seems that the results of higher pitch stability for singing reported in the literature cannot be generalised, particularly for the popular genre in which there is a prosodic proximity between singing and speech. These interesting findings also motivate to analyse other aspects of dynamic pitch and duration to better understand the prosodic differences between the two modalities.

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Music and Lyrics Interactions and their Influence on Recognition of Sung Words: An Investigation of Word Frequency, Rhyme, Metric Stress, Vocal Timbre, Melisma, and Repetition Priming

Cited by 29 publications

References 13 publications

The Influence of Interactions Between Music and Lyrics: What Factors Underlie the Intelligibility of Sung Text?

The Influence of Interactions Between Music and Lyrics: What Factors Underlie the Intelligibility of Sung Text?

The Musical Impact of Multicultural London English (MLE) Speech Rhythm

Acoustic distinctions between speech and singing: Is singing acoustically more stable than speech?

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