Klarinet Archive - Posting 000420.txt from 2001/06

From: Tony@-----.uk (Tony Pay)
Subj: Re: [kl] Phrasing and cocktail party theory
Date: Wed, 13 Jun 2001 20:44:32 -0400

On Wed, 13 Jun 2001 10:49:12 -0700 (PDT), Bilwright@-----.net said:

[snip]

> Here's a quote from the web page:
>
> ===============================
> Most English words are accentuated by force; and in short words this
> stress accent tends to fall at the beginning of the word: VER-y [big
> snip] The situation is reversed on the other side of the Channel, for
> the French accentuate the final syllable of a word. and they do it by
> length, not by strength. This means that the strong note of the musical
> measure must support the end of a word. In other words, it is not
> altogether clear that the strong beats of a musical measure meant the
> same thing to a 17th- or 18th-century Frenchman that it meant to an
> Englishman (or an Italian or a German).
> ==================================
>
> I am not arguing that one type of phrasing is better than another.
>
> Nor am I disputing a point of history (such as who played what or how).
>
> But it seems unrealistic to me to propose a biological or acoustic
> imperative for beginning-oriented phrasing. Perhaps an artistic or
> historical imperative, but not a biological or acoustic imperative.
> There are many ways of separating musical phrases that are played
> simultaneously or in succession. (see the web page cited above)

There are two points.

The first is that there is no statement about *words* at all in PIC.
The discussion is entirely about syllables. The French final syllable
has the same general character as any other syllable.

Secondly, there is no insistence about how 'beginning-orientation' is to
be achieved. Dynamic stress would be one way. But as I say in PIC:

"Warmer, more energetic, brighter, louder, more insistent or more
stroked are a few ideas to be going on with, but by no means all of
these would appropriate to any one particular phrase."

And in the 'Cocktail Party theory' I say:

"However, that all languages have 'beginning-oriented' syllables doesn't
mean that 'beginning-orientation' is a simple thing to characterise. (I
have been purposely vague in describing it.) In fact, the lack of such
a simple characterisation was notoriously part of the difficulty in
programming automatic speech-recognition software. Researchers found it
very difficult to make explicit the rules that would allow their
programs to segment the continuous sound of speech into syllables, in
order to match them with the syllables that constitute dictionary words.
That humans find this problem trivial in practice shouldn't blind us to
the subtlety of what's involved in solving it. We just have very good
speech-production and speech-recognition software 'built in'. And
co-ordinately, we shouldn't be surprised that the corresponding musical
techniques are difficult to characterise in detail too, even though
young players often learn to execute them quite naturally."

With regard to that webpage, it's probably true that a setter of French
words often puts the final syllable of a word on a strong metric beat, a
setter of Italian words often puts the penultimate syllable of a word on
a strong metric beat, and a setter of English words often puts the first
syllable of a word on a strong metric beat.

But all this is beside the point I was trying to make. No one wants to
claim that music always follows words, and certainly no one would want
to claim that French music is always different from English or Italian
music.

The claim is simply that audibility of line has a biological basis. If
you want a line to be audible, it helps if it shares the rather abstract
quality of 'beginning-orientation' with the *syllables* of speech.

Tony
--
_________ Tony Pay
|ony:-) 79 Southmoor Rd Tony@-----.uk
| |ay Oxford OX2 6RE GMN artist: http://www.gmn.com
tel/fax 01865 553339

... Now I do not believe you wanted to do that, did you?

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