Singing and Accompaniment Support the Processing of Song Lyrics and Change the Lyrics' Meaning

A growing body of evidence indicates that music can support the processing of language. Some of its beneficial effects may even occur after one exposure. Accompaniment can also have an impact: in a-cappella singing, silences and out-of-key notes may confuse listeners, while accompaniment avoids silences and elucidates both rhythm and harmony, thereby supporting music-processing and concentration. These hypotheses were tested in two experiments. In a classroom setting, 271 pupils (M = 15.7 years old, SD = 0.9), listened to five out of 24 tracks (four songs in six different conditions) and completed a questionnaire after each one. As expected, the instrumental interludes between sung or spoken phrases in accompanied versions were rated less distracting than the silences that replace them in unaccompanied ones. Furthermore, perceived arousal, emotion, valence, and purity of singing were rated more positively in accompanied versions. Singing, on the other hand, supports the perceived intelligibility and comprehensibility of the lyrics. Finally, the music makes repetitions of words and phrases more meaningful and changes the lyrics' emotional meaning, wereby some aspects of sadness are associated with negative affect while other aspects of sadness are associated with positive affect. These results were by and large replicated in a better randomized laboratory experiment among 24 adults (M = 24.4; SD = 4.8)

Reanalyzing Schotanus 2020: A reaction to Lee's commentary

In his commentary on Schotanus 2020 "Singing and Accompaniment Support the Processing of Song Lyrics and Change the Lyrics", Lee (2020) discusses several methodological issues related to this article, proposes a reanalysis of part the data, and asks for additional research. This reaction provides the reanalysis asked for, and briefly discusses additional research, and further issues

Comparing Word Affect and Tone Affect: Comment on Sun and Cuthbert 2017

In the article "Emotion Painting: Lyric, affect, and musical relationships in a large lead-sheet corpus", Sun and Cuthbert (2017) explored the correlations between affect-carrying lyrics and musical features such as beat strength, pitch height, consonance, and mode. Several musical features did indeed turn out to be highly correlated with the affect of the lyrics. However, correlations between other features, particularly mode-related musical features and lyric affect, were either insignificant or even contradicted previous research. In the current commentary, it is argued that the difference between the musical features that show significant correlations and those that do not is that the former have a local musical effect whereas the latter tend to affect the mood of a whole phrase or piece, and that the way Sun and Cuthbert estimate lyric affect for sentences or song may not be appropriate. Furthermore, a few remarks are made about the way Sun and Cuthbert treat multi-syllable words and about some basic assumptions concerning the relation between music and lyrics in a song. Nevertheless, the authors are praised for their innovative and interesting work, while several alternative and additional analyses (for example with scale-degree qualia and syncopations) are proposed

How a Song’s Section Order Affects Both ‘Refrein’ Perception and the Song’s Perceived Meaning

Digital technologies provide excellent possibilities to create various versions of musical stimuli without changing the performance. Thus, the effect of specific musical properties (such as pitch height, timing or section order) can be tested in a performance-neutral way. In a small listening experiment, the section order within a song is manipulated digitally to investigate several hypotheses. As expected, the perception of song sections as either verse, chorus or bridge turns out to be dependent not only on their musical and lyrical properties but also on their position within the song. The interpretation of a song’s meaning is also partly determined by section order. As evidenced by the author’s research, the participants’ interpretation of a song is mainly based on the song section that they perceive to be the ‘refrein’ (i.e. the chorus, or the leading refrain line)

Well Tempered Tuning Cannot Account for Low Purity Ratings of Isolated Voice Parts

Since Western people usually hear melodies in well tempered tunings, it is doubtful whether laymen would use a pure tuning as a reference when asked to judge whether a certain melody is sung in tune or not. In an earlier class room experiment among approximately 274 pupils (average age 15.6; SD 0.9) the isolated voice part of several songs was rated less in tune than the same voice part presented with the original accompaniment, although every mistuning was digitally corrected. It was hypothesized that these differences were due to the fact that music processing is more difficult without accompaniment defining rhythm and harmony. The aim of the current experiment was to test the competing hypothesis that purity ratings in conditions without accompaniment are affected by the fact that in a capella conditions a pure tuning is expected. To test this, 32 of the pupils that also participated in the earlier experiment (mean age 15.5; SD = 0.5) and 36 adults (average age 56; SD = 15), rated the purity of the singing in six excerpts of the same songs in two conditions: pure tuning and well tempered tuning. The results indicate that in general there is no significant difference between purity ratings for excerpts in pure tuning, and excerpts in well tempered tuning. Among adults and pupils separately there are no differences. Among the total population, the pure tuning of one excerpt is significantly higher. Musical experience seems to have a small but interesting effect on purity ratings. Experienced musicians give relatively high purity ratings in both conditions, but tend to rate pure tunings slightly higher than well tempered ones, whereas listeners with moderate musical experience tend to rate well tempered tunings slightly higher

Out-of-Key Notes and On-Beat Silences as Prosodic Cues in Sung Sentences

Violations of musical syntactic expectancies such as out-of-key notes are known to interact with linguistic processing, due to shared syntactic integration resources, located in Broca’s area. As these are syntactic integration resource, researchers have assumed that such events negatively affect the processing of language and that they do not affect semantics. However, the results of this study challenge both assumptions. An online listen-experiment shows that out-of-key notes sometimes do affect semantics. Thirty participants listened to thirty sung sentences in three conditions and rated the plausibility of literal and colored (emotional, ironic or metaphoric) interpretations. Out-of-key notes significantly affected these ratings. Loud rests (on beat silences) did not yield a similar effect

Out-of-Key Notes and On-Beat Silences as Prosodic Cues in Sung Sentences

Violations of musical syntactic expectancies such as out-of-key notes are known to interact with linguistic processing, due to shared syntactic integration resources, located in Broca’s area. As these are syntactic integration resource, researchers have assumed that such events negatively affect the processing of language and that they do not affect semantics. However, the results of this study challenge both assumptions. An online listen-experiment shows that out-of-key notes sometimes do affect semantics. Thirty participants listened to thirty sung sentences in three conditions and rated the plausibility of literal and colored (emotional, ironic or metaphoric) interpretations. Out-of-key notes significantly affected these ratings. Loud rests (on beat silences) did not yield a similar effect

The Musical Foregrounding Hypothesis : How Music Influences the Perception of Sung Language

Abstract The question how music influences the perception of sung language is rather complicated. There are indications that music enhances lyric perception, but also that it obstructs it. Sometimes we are deeply moved by lyrics, sometimes we don’t even hear them. The linguistic concept of foregrounding, might be helpful to understand this paradoxical process. Foregrounding (the use of metaphors and parallelisms, etcetera) is supposed to draw attention to the language by obstructing normal understanding of it1. The Musical Foregrounding Hypothesis (MFH) states that matching words to music has a similar, though much more complex, effect to language perception. Language— music— cognition— education—music therapy— poetics— advertising—song writin

Music Supports the Processing of Song Lyrics and Changes their Contents: : Effects of Melody, Silences and Accompaniment

A growing body of evidence indicates that singing might affect the perception of language both in a supportive and in a detrimental way. Accompaniment might be a factor of interest, because loud rests (on-beat silences) and out-of-key notes may confuse listeners, while accompaniment might elucidate rhythm and harmony and reduces the amount of silences. This might further music processing and concentration. The main aim of the experiment was to test this hypothesis in a class room situation and investigate at the same time, whether school children might benefit from the use of song, even after a single exposure. A total of 274 pupils (average age 15, SD 0,6), spread over twelve fixed groups, listened to four complete songs in six different conditions (spoken or sung, with and without accompaniment, sung with ‘lala’ instead of lyrics, and accompaniment only). In a regular lesson Dutch Language and Literature each group listened to five different tracks and completed a questionnaire after each track. The questions concerned processing fluency, valence, comprehension, recall, emotion and repetition. Listeners rated accompanied songs more beautiful and less exhaustive than unaccompanied songs or spoken lyrics, and had the feeling that in these songs the text is more intelligible and comprehensive. With accompaniment the singers voice was considered more relaxed and in tune than without (although the same recordings were used). Furthermore, the silences in unaccompanied versions were rated more distracting than the interludes or the accompaniment in the other conditions. Lyrics were considered more happy, funny, sensitive and energetic, and less sad, heavy and nagging in the sung versions. Finally, verbatim repetition of words is less accepted when spoken, and adds (mainly) emotional meaning to those words in the sung conditions. These findings indicate that accompanied singing supports the transfer of verbal information, although it affects the contents of the words

Off-Beat Phrasing and the Interpretation of the Singer’s Tone of Voice

Both music and lyrics are thought to affect the emotional meaning of a song, but to date it is not exactly clear how and to what extent music does so. Possibly, timing is an important factor. Both singers and composers often create off-beat onsets of important linguistic events, such as the first stressed syllable in a phrase (henceforward: phrase onset). However, off-beat events are more difficult to process, which is hypothesized to cause a foregrounding effect, which would affect the interpretation of the singer’s state of mind, his or her intentions, and the meaning of the words. An online listening experiment was created to test this hypothesis. Thirty participants listened to 27 piano-accompanied sung sentences, consisting of five or six syllables, some of them statements, some of them questions, imperatives, or incomplete sentences. In nine of them the phrase-onset was on-beat, in 9 it was early and in the remaining 9 it was late. After each sentence participants rated 10 items concerning the way words, music and singer are perceived. Three factors emerged from a factor analysis on these ratings. Regressions on these factors show that they are hardly affected by timing. Surprisingly, also sentence type did just marginally affect one factor. This indicates that music is more important in communicating aspects of meaning such as sincerity, self-security or compellingness