In charting the “territory between speech and song,” Cummins (2020) identifies various forms of vocal behavior involving “multiple people uttering the same thing at the same time”—what the author calls “joint speech.” I interrogate this conceptual framework in light of specific examples both musical and linguistic, which suggest a usefully expanded category: “collaborative vocality.” At the same time, I also propose a distinctly musical account of joint speech that ultimately affirms the conventional separation between music and language. Central to this account is an analysis of the unique character of singing and an insistence on the centrality of pleasure in musical experience.

In charting the “territory between speech and song,” Cummins (2020) identifies various forms of vocal behavior involving “multiple people uttering the same thing at the same time”—what the author calls “joint speech.” I interrogate this conceptual framework in light of specific examples both musical and linguistic, which suggest a usefully expanded category: “collaborative vocality.” At the same time, I also propose a distinctly musical account of joint speech that ultimately affirms the conventional separation between music and language. Central to this account is an analysis of the unique character of singing and an insistence on the centrality of pleasure in musical experience.

W hile syncopation generally refers to any conflict between surface accents and underlying meter, in rock and other recent popular styles it takes a more specific form in which accented notes occur just before strong beats. Such “anticipatory” syncopations suggest that there is an underlying cognitive representation in which the accented notes and strong beats align. Syllabic stress is crucial to the identification of such syncopations; to facilitate this, we present a corpus of rock melodies annotated with lyrics and syllabic stress values. We propose a new measure of syncopation that incorporates syllabic stress; we also propose a measure of anticipatory syncopation, and show that it reveals a strong presence of this type of syncopation in rock music. We then use these measures to explore other aspects of syncopation in rock, including its occurrence in different parts of the 4/4 measure, its dependence on tempo, its historical evolution, and its aesthetic functions.

Listeners frequently talk about music in terms of imagined stories, but little empirical research has investigated this tendency. In this study, 47 participants listened to eight 90-second musical excerpts—four of which featured programmatic music composed between 1857-1935 and were selected by music theorists to feature high contrast, and four of which featured Baroque and minimal music and were selected by music theorists to feature low contrast. After each one, they answered a variety of questions intended to assess their narrative engagement with the music. Brief assessments of personality and general listening tendencies were administered at the end of the session. Results showed qualified support for the notion that contrast makes people likelier to hear music in terms of narrative, with stylistic familiarity and enjoyment seeming to play a greater role. The most striking aspect of the results was the emergence of broad areas of consensus among the free descriptions of imagined narratives. People with high AIMS scores also tended to experience more narrative engagement with the music, as did people low in Extraversion and Conscientiousness.

This paper describes the first laboratory study of an idiosyncratic linguistic form that represents a crucial point of contact between speech and song: what is referred to here as the stylized interjection . The stylized interjection, as described throughout the musicological and linguistic literature, is associated with a particular intonational formula—the calling contour —and intriguingly, with a purportedly cross-cultural musical fingerprint: the interval of the minor third. A reading task was used to systematically compare the stylized interjection to four other linguistic forms, and to compare spoken to called production. Analysis of several acoustic variables (involving pitch, duration, intensity, and timbre) demonstrates many significant effects of sentence-type and production, which together establish the characteristics of the English stylized interjection and suggest its interpretation as sung speech . The unique sound-meaning correspondence of the stylized interjection is thereby elucidated. Implications for music-language studies (especially vis-a-vis the minor third) are also discussed.

there is debate about the extent of overlap between music and language processing in the brain and whether these processes are functionally independent in expert musicians. A language comprehension task and a visuospatial search task were administered to 36 expert musicians and 36 matched nonmusicians in conditions of silence and piano music played correctly and incorrectly. Musicians performed more poorly on the language comprehension task in the presence of background music compared to silence, but there was no effect of background music on the musicians' performance on the visuospatial task. In contrast, the performance of nonmusicians was not affected by music on either task. The findings challenge the view that music and language are functionally independent in expert musicians, and instead suggest that when musicians process music they recruit a network that overlaps with the network used in language processing. Additionally, musicians outperformed nonmusicians on both tasks, reflecting either a general cognitive advantage in musicians or enhancement of more specific cognitive abilities such as processing speed or executive functioning.