Comparing rhythm and melody in speech and music: The case of English and French

Does the prosody of a nation’s language leave an imprint on its music? We address this question by comparing British English and French, a stress-timed vs syllable-timed language with salient intonational differences. We previously showed that an empirical difference between speech rhythm in the two cultures is reflected in instrumental music. In this study we expand on these rhythmic measurements and provide new data on melody. We compare English and French intonation using a measure which can also be applied to musical melodies. In a database of read speech we converted the intonation contour of each sentence into a sequence of vowel pitches, using the mean fundamental frequency of each vowel to represent its pitch. We found that the size of pitch intervals between successive vowels varied more in British English than in French speech. We then examined classical instrumental music and found that pitch intervals between successive notes varied more in English than in French music. We also examined differences in the way rhythm and melody are aligned in both speech and music. Overall, we find that the prosody of a culture’s language is reflected in the structure of its instrumental music. [Supported by Neurosciences Research Foundation.]