The Music of Speech: Effort, Expectations, Effects and Affect

For millennia, thinkers have been intrigued by the relationship between language and music. These two distinctly human traits are both structurally complex and profoundly meaningful.

Analysis of musical form using insights from linguistics has revealed great similarities in structure across the two domains, but comparisons of their meaning have not been so productive.

The fundamental notion that underpins meaning in language is truth, but a piece of music, just like any other artwork, cannot be true or false.

This project seeks to develop a framework which can account for aspects of emotional meaning in music and language without recourse to semantic analyses, and uses common notions in the study in music processing and pragmatics: expectations and effect. It argues there are parallels worth exploring.

In the study of music processing, considerable evidence reveals that listeners' emotional responses to music depend on whether such expectations are satisfied or violated: on the one hand, we feel that certain notes inevitably lead to others. On the other, attention-grabbing leaps demand extra attention.

Current accounts of music processing have developed probabilistic models of expectation and explored their role in musical experience.

Relevance theory (Sperber & Wilson 1995), is a pragmatic theory of utterance interpretation which stems from the claim that humans are always seeking relevance .

As such, hearers expect the communicative stimuli they receive will be relevant enough to be worth processing in that they will provide enough communicative effects for the processing effort required to understand them.

The project will explore two instances where a confounding of expectations leads to increased processing and, therefore, the communication of strong emotion.

The first is prosody (often called 'the music of speech') (Wharton 2009); the second is the additional emotional effects produced when unexpected poetic form can similarly provide a sense of closure (Fabb 2016).