Prosodic Boundaries in Singing: An exploration of the temporal effects of linguistic structure in western music

The practice of singing dates back to the beginnings of human history and represents the convergence of two similar systems: language and music. Within these two systems, the fields of linguistic prosody and musical meter each use the temporal domain to express their underlying structure. At times, these expressional requirements differ, necessitating either compromise or dominance of one system over the other. For instance, in the case of misalignments between the metrical stress of music and of language, musical stress was found to be dominant (Palmer & Kelly, 1992). Through an experiment carried out with participants singing a prepared text, this study examined the effect that prosodic boundaries have when misaligned with musical meter to examine whether prosodic boundaries will cause pre-boundary lengthening despite the temporal requirements of expressing musical meter. Results suggest that the necessity for final lengthening at a prosodic boundary is great enough to displace the subsequent beats temporally from their normal alignment due to musical meter.