in this study we examine a rhythmic pattern known as the Scotch Snap (SS): a sixteenth-note on the beat followed by a dotted eighth-note. A musical corpus analysis shows that the SS is common in both Scottish and English songs, but virtually nonexistent in German and Italian songs. We explore possible linguistic correlates for this phenomenon. Our reasoning is that languages in which stressed syllables are often short might tend to favor the SS pattern. The traditional distinction between long and short vowels correlates partly with the SS pattern across languages, but not completely. (German allows short stressed vowels, but the SS pattern is not common in German music.) We then examine the duration of stressed syllables in four modern speech corpora: one British English, one German, and two Italian. British English shows a much higher proportion of very short stressed syllables (less than 100 ms) than the other two languages. Four vowels account for a large proportion of very short stressed syllables in British English, and also constitute a large proportion of SS tokens in our English musical corpus. This is the first study known to us that establishes a correlation between speech rhythms in languages and musical rhythms in the songs of those languages.
Skip Nav Destination
Close
Article navigation
September 2011
Research Article|
September 01 2011
Music-Language Correlations and the “Scotch Snap”
Nicholas Temperley
;
Nicholas Temperley
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Search for other works by this author on:
David Temperley
David Temperley
Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester
Search for other works by this author on:
Music Perception (2011) 29 (1): 51–63.
Article history
Received:
August 12 2010
Accepted:
March 01 2011
Citation
Nicholas Temperley, David Temperley; Music-Language Correlations and the “Scotch Snap”. Music Perception 1 September 2011; 29 (1): 51–63. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/mp.2011.29.1.51
Download citation file:
Close
Sign in
Don't already have an account? Register
Client Account
You could not be signed in. Please check your email address / username and password and try again.