… on the inherent musicality of the words that we speak By Stephen Davismoon When one contemplates the musical/vocal setting of any word (from across our world’s many languages and/ or its countless regional accents/dialects), he or she immediately (possibly unwittingly) enters into a dialectic relationship of pitch and timbre, which, in many senses exists before/separate to and reaches beyond the tip of the composer’s own pen. Since, as a word is spoken, the myriad epithets that constitute its inherent sonorous universe are set in train. Over the life of the sounding of this word, a complex ever-changing sonic continuum is set in motion, creating – at a micro-level – its own distinct musicality. This is the raw/natural sound material that the composer is confronted with, when trying to give birth to a song. And it’s a beguiling – somewhat vertiginous – dialectic at that! On the one hand it presents us with a high level of (near-global) consistency; while on the other, it presents to us what appears to be, a potentiality for endless possibilities of sonic variation and transformation. As relatively recent phonological and psychoacoustical research has shown, when we speak (in some languages more than others, granted) at the same time we – in many senses – ‘sing’. The near-perfect tuning and the high level of precision in terms of amplitude and/or dynamic control of the all-important first and second formant frequencies of the vowels in the words that we utter, is crucial to our being understood by those about us; thereby utterly vital to our successful vocal self-expression and communication. The slight variations that do occur in our musical control of the vowels in the words that we speak, will depend largely upon the lexicon of our mother tongue, the location/region of our accent and – at the end of the day – on our very own personal physiology (ie. that that makes you, you; and me, me!), ie. how large our vocal tract might be and so on. Setting to one side these regional and personal physical differences, it would seem though that (and which serves nicely here as a starting point for our discussion) each vowel has a frequency-band ‘peak’ as indicated below (given in standard music notation, ie. the vowel ‘a’ has a peak of acoustical energy between C5 and D6 and so on; it will be noted that the vowels ‘e’ and ‘i’ have two peak regions of acoustical energy):
Probably any singer versed in the Bel Canto tradition – where the vocalisation of the vowel is all-important – will know instinctively that the diagram above makes some sense, practically or technically speaking at least, in that it is much more comfortable to sing a high note on a word with an ‘a’ vowel as its focus, than it is on a word which has a ‘u’ as its target. To listeners it may also help to explain why, when singers are singing ‘outside’ or far from these ‘natural’ frequency bandwidths, it is sometimes difficult to perceive the diction and to understand the words that are being sung. Of course though, this singing ‘against’ or ‘outside’ of nature can very much have its own artistic merits. The complex sonic behaviour of a spoken vowel over time is also altered depending upon: whether or not it is to be extended or truncated; what kind of consonant (‘noise’ – frictive/plosive, etc.) it emerges from or quits to; or if it is to travel to or from yet another vowel. In fact the deeper one goes into the sonic fabric of a spoken word, only then is one aware of the highly complex, phenomenological nature of the sonic relationships at play.
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