Music & Language Studies

Jonathan G. Secora Pearl
Linguistics Colloquium, May 18, 2006
University of California—Santa Barbara

Abstract
Music and language are twin aspects of civilization, found in all known human cultures, across time and place, embracing us from our earliest days until the ends of our lives. Speaking and singing are found everywhere and everywhen. Wherein lies the distinction?

The greatest difficulty in answering this foundational question is that we are often deceived by written forms of music and language into believing our object dwells within them, rather than in the sounds that inspire them. On the page, these materials appear far more distinct than they do in sound. Text without context is a world without air; yet context alone remains the unanalyzable chaos of everyday experience. The trick is to find the balance between too much detail, and too little.

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The slide show and handout for Jonathan’s presentation at the 2007 annual meeting of the German Society of Linguistics (DGfS) in Siegen has been added to the website.

To be presented at the Annual Meeting of the German Society of Linguistics (DgfS)
(28 Feb 2007 – 2 Mar 2007)

Jonathan G. Secora Pearl
Department of Linguistics
University of California, Santa Barbara
jpearl@ linguistics.ucsb.edu

Abstract: “Varieties of Czech Prosody, a century ago and today”.

In 1897, the Czech composer and pedagogue Leoš Janáček (1854-1928) began a journey into the field of speech prosody, eventually spanning the final three decades of his life. (Pearl 2006) His procedure involved detailed observation of natural phenomena, and a good deal of confidence in his own intuitions. For more than 30 years he eavesdropped, often clandestinely, on the conversations of those around him, recording their utterances in the system most familiar to him, musical notation. These efforts are remarkable for a variety of reasons: because they captured a great many nuances of natural speech, some of which are lost by contemporary transcription techniques; because they have been all but ignored over the ensuing century; because they represent some of the earliest and most extensive attempts to concurrently describe the melody and rhythm of speech prosody, permitting the possibility to explore matters of diachronic change.

Janáček worked mostly with the Czech language, but also Russian, Slovak, Croatian, German, English, Italian, and others. His transcriptions provide us a glimpse into the everyday speech of a century ago, which otherwise might be lost, due to a dearth of audio recordings, and the poor quality of what does exist. I will begin my talk with a presentation of some of Janáček’s transcriptions of Czech, including discussion of the benefits and pitfalls of a music-based transcriptional system, then follow with presentation of modern-day recordings of spontaneous spoken Czech, along with the author’s prosodic transcriptions of these selections, which build on Janáček’s procedure, yet exploit today’s technologies and software, to describe melodic and rhythmic features of contemporary spoken Czech.

Pearl, J. (2006), “Eavesdropping with a Master: Leoš Janáček and the Music of Speech,” Empirical Musicology Review Vol. 1, No. 3.

Kulka, Jiří. “Leoš Janáček’s Aesthetic Thinking,” Rozpravy Československé Akademie Věd 100:1 (1990), pp. 3-75.

The dissertation page has been updated. A text version of the abstract can be found there, as well as a download link for the complete dissertation (The Music of Language: the notebooks of Leoš Janáček) in .pdf format.

Added page on analysis of Czech speech prosody.