Music & Language Studies

Not Awaiting Dolly: Louis Armstrong’s speaking style
Louis Armstrong’s various renditions of the song “Hello Dolly” present a concrete basis for examining the issue of swing as reflected in vocal entrances. This paper will present and discuss the means and extent to which he uses salient entrances to push the beat ahead, and the ends of phrases or less salient entrances to return to a baseline tempo. I will briefly show how his particular choices in this regard differ from those of other performances of this same song.

These aspects of performance practice however are not limited to music alone. Rather they can be observed in spontaneous conversation as well. Linguists discuss features of speaking styles, including the anticipation or delay of beats in turn taking. The focus of this paper is to compare and contrast how the same effects can be observed in music and language, and what that reveals about commonalities and differences between them.

The methodology used here is one of acoustic analysis from digitized recordings of performances of the song “Hello Dolly”, as well as digitized recordings of spontaneous and naturally spoken discourse (a term used in Linguistics to describe language interaction in its broadest sense). Rather than examining scores of music or textual transcripts of language, the present effort seeks to highlight performed durations, and to a lesser extent pitches, through examination in detail of the sounds themselves. Transcriptions and calculations are rendered from the performances. This technique brings to the fore issues of perceptual salience, how for instance we perceive widely divergent durations as nonetheless bearing the same note value in context. Why and how these issues arise will be addressed.

Finally, in addition to comments regarding the interactions between musical and linguistic materials, and our perceptions of them, I will be presenting issues of transcription and notation, that reveal shortcuts and pitfalls to writing systems for both music and language, and point toward a greater awareness of the similarities between research in these two fields.