MARCS Research Seminar

Dr Myfany Turpin, School of Languages and Comparative Cultural Studies from University of Queensland will be presenting "The ghosts of syllables parsed: meter and performance in an Aboriginal singing genre".

Abstract: Setting words to musical rhythm is an attempt to match rhythmic positions and syllables in an aesthetically appealing manner. In English songs acceptability (or well-formedness) is based on two separate but interactive judgments: matching stress with metrically strong positions, and matching prosodic constituents with musical constituents (Dell & Halle 2009). Drawing on the framework of generative metrics (Halle & Lerdahl 1993), this paper describes what makes a well-formed song in a genre of Aboriginal songs of Central Australia called Akwelye. I show that Akwelye is a syllable counting meter, where each syllable within a phonological word is matched to a note of equal duration within a bar. In Akwelye there is no requirement to match a stressed syllable with a strong beat. Instead, the placement of syllables is conditioned by two rules; one effecting the structure of the text and the other the structure of the rhythm. The text constraint requires syllables to be CV(C) and the rhythmic constraint prohibits a group of fewer notes from preceding one with more in the formation of a line. An optional rule then permits syllable elision on a weak beat and the preceding syllable takes over the duration of the elided syllable. The resultant rhythmic-texts and their fixed pattern of repetition are then set to a melodic contour in varying ways, a process Jakobson regards as performance, and outside of the domain of verse design (1960), but Kiparsky, in contrast, argues for as part of a broad metrics (2010).