Page 254 - DENG504_LINGUISTICS

Linguistics

Notes Indian music
Indian music has also been passed on orally. Tabla players would learn to speak complex rhythm
patterns and phrases before attempting to play them. Sheila Chandra, an English pop singer of
Indian descent, made performances based on her singing these patterns. In Indian Classical music,
the Tala of a composition is the rhythmic pattern over which the whole piece is structured.

Western music
In the 20th century, composers like Igor Stravinsky, Béla Bartók, Philip Glass, and Steve Reich
wrote more rhythmically complex music using odd meters, and techniques such as phasing and
additive rhythm. At the same time, modernists such as Olivier Messiaen and his pupils used
increased complexity to disrupt the sense of a regular beat, leading eventually to the widespread
use of irrational rhythms in New Complexity. This use may be explained by a comment of John
Cage's where he notes that regular rhythms cause sounds to be heard as a group rather than
individually; the irregular rhythms highlight the rapidly changing pitch relationships that would
otherwise be subsumed into irrelevant rhythmic groupings. LaMonte Young also wrote music in
which the sense of a regular beat is absent because the music consists only of long sustained tones
(drones). In the 1930s, Henry Cowell wrote music involving multiple simultaneous periodic rhythms
and collaborated with Léon Thérémin to invent the Rhythmicon, the first electronic rhythm machine,
in order to perform them. Similarly, Conlon Nancarrow wrote for the player piano.
Use of polyrhythms in American music is generally traced to the influence of black culture through
Dixieland and Jazz styles. The effect of multiple soloing in these forms, often utilizing cross-
rhythms comes directly from the underlying aesthetics of sub-Saharan African music. These complex
rhythmic structures have been widely adopted in many current forms of western popular music.

18.3 Rhythm in Linguistics

In linguistics, rhythm or isochrony is one of the three aspects of prosody, along with stress and
intonation. Languages can be categorized according to whether they are syllable-timed or stress-
timed. Speakers of syllable-timed languages such as Spanish and Cantonese put roughly equal
time on each syllable; in contrast, speakers of stressed-timed languages such as English and
Mandarin Chinese put roughly equal time lags between stressed syllables, with the timing of the
unstressed syllables in between them being adjusted to accommodate the stress timing.
Narmour describes three categories of prosodic rules which create rhythmic successions which are
additive (same duration repeated), cumulative (short-long), or countercumulative (long-short).
Cumulation is associated with closure or relaxation, countercumulation with openness or tension,
while additive rhythms are open-ended and repetitive. Richard Middleton points out this method
cannot account for syncopation and suggests the concept of transformation.

18.4 Right Hemisphere Damage

Rhythm in the speech of a person with right hemisphere damage: Applying the Pairwise Although
several aspects of prosody have been studied in speakers with right hemisphere damage (RHD),
rhythm remains largely uninvestigated. This paper compares the rhythm of an Australian English
speaker with right hemisphere damage to that of a neurologically unimpaired individual using
the pairwise variability index (PVI). The PVI allows for an acoustic characterisation of rhythm by
comparing the duration of successive vocalic and intervocalic intervals. A sample of speech from
a structured interview between a speech and language therapist and each participant was analysed,
and it was hypothesised that there may be some rhythmic disturbance as previous research findings
show difficulties in other areas of prosody for this population. Results show that the neurologically
normal control uses a similar rhythm to that reported for British English (there are no previous
studies available for Australian English), whilst the speaker with RHD produces speech with a
less strongly stress-timed rhythm. This finding was statistically significant for the intervocalic
intervals measured, and suggests that some aspects of prosody may be right lateralised for this

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