Rhythm

11 Key excerpts on "Rhythm"

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  English Rhythm and Blues

  Where Language and Music Come Together

  • Patrice Paul Larroque(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  1 He considers meter like a dividing agent which consequently implies the existence of a whole. Conversely, he describes Rhythm as a uniting agent which actually contributes to the building of a whole and makes it progress. The progression can be organized around the periodical occurrence of stress patterns.

  In linguistics, the study of stress and Rhythm is part of the science of prosody. Prosody can be defined as the rules, or rather the principles, which govern duration, pitch, amplitude, frequency, loudness, and pause in vocal music. When he or she talks, a speaker naturally puts Rhythm in his speech, that is, by articulating or punctuating, by making syllables more prominent than others. In an utterance in English, strong beats are perceptually salient and generally coincide with important meaningful words; the others elements of the utterance will be unaccented.

  Prosody is also sensitive to syntax, morphology, the intended meaning conveyed by speech and enunciation: fluency, utterance rate, focus, etc. (cf. for example Schlüter 2005 : 17). While meter can be regarded as an inner phenomenon, as a process of measuring literary composition, Rhythm, which is linked with the perceptual aspect of speech, will apply to the different patterns and variables of spoken language.

  The present discussion will first be an attempt to circumscribe what the notion of Rhythm represents, its beats, tempo, and (especially African) influences. In this first part, the ideal euRhythmic structure of English is dealt with; it is, however, a structure which may present infractions. A second part is devoted to compensatory measures which aim at repairing these violations and thus restore the natural Rhythm of English speech.

  2.2 Rhythm

  The word “Rhythm” comes from Latin Rhythmus, derived from Ancient Greek ρυθμός (rhuthmos, from the verb ρεϊν, “rhein,” flow

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  Listening to Spoken English

  • Gillian Brown(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  3 The function of Rhythm 3.1 The Rhythmic structure of English Every language has its own characteristic Rhythm and one of the most difficult areas to master of the spoken form of a foreign language is that of Rhythm. The Rhythm is part of the general look of how the speakers of their language speak it. It is intimately bound in with the whole muscular setting which characterizes the speakers of different languages—the way the head is held and moved during speech, the way the lower jaw and tongue are held in relation to the upper jaw, the great variety of bodily movement of different kinds which help us to identify speakers of different languages even without hearing them speak. It takes a great deal of confidence to be able to put aside the identifying muscular characteristics of one's own language and adopt those of another, and very few teaching programmes will find time to try to teach students to master anything so difficult. It is however essential that students should be encouraged to be aware of these characteristics. This is because Rhythm in English is not just something extra, added to the basic sequence of consonants and vowels, it is the guide to the structure of information in the spoken message. We will begin by discussing what Rhythm is and then go on to discuss its function. The Rhythm of English is based on the contrast of stressed and unstressed syllables. If you watch an English speaker talking you will be able to see, without hearing what he is saying, where the stressed syllables are. All the big muscular movements that he makes are in time with the stressed syllables. When he waves his arms, nods his head, puts his foot down, raises his eyebrows, frowns, opens his jaw more widely, purses his lips; all this is done in time with the Rhythm of speech. This is of course hardly surprising

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  How Language Speaks to Music

  Prosody from a Cross-domain Perspective

  • Mathias Scharinger, Richard Wiese, Mathias Scharinger, Richard Wiese(Authors)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter

    (Publisher)

  The highest level of the grid, as proposed by the present author, has the same kind of optional grid entries as those given in (2), to which alternative placements are available. Rhythm in the sense introduced here is not strictly tied to its acoustic realization. In (4), this is again obvious from those beats in which there is no melodic note, as for the second beat in bars 2, 3, and 4.

  Beats, Rhythm and meter may thus be acoustically prominent (and measurable), but not necessarily so. The difficulties in measuring Rhythm have tempted some researchers to characterize Rhythm as a “collective hallucination”; Liberman, 1975 . But as there is comprehensive evidence for a role of Rhythm in the acquisition, perception, and change of language, there is reason to argue that Rhythm is a phonological structuring of linguistic expressions, grounded in both phonetic preferences as well as Rhythmical principles; see also Mołczanow & Wiese (2014) . Phonetic preferences might arise, e.g., by the fact that periodic muscle activity for lung contraction generates temporal patterns of syllables or feet; Abercrombie, 1992 . As for the metrical grid, Jackendoff (2009) stresses that “in the Rhythmic domain, the metrical grid may well be a genuine capacity unique to language and music”, but also emphasizes that the degree of regularity is different for these two domains.

  3  Rhythm in music and in language

  We have seen that Rhythm in music (at least of the type considered) displays two fundamental ingredients, namely repetition and alternation. Lerdahl’s & Jackendoff’s account of regular repetition (1983) is stated as a wellformedness rule as in (5). (In the second edition of their work, the authors note that such wellformedness rules show the properties of constraints in the sense of Optimality Theory: they may be violated so that other, higher ranked, constraints are fulfilled.) For the examples in (2) and (4), this rule is fulfilled without exception.

  (5)

  Metrical Wellformedness Rule

  Each metrical level must consist of equally spaced beats.

  In Western tonal music, such alternating Rhythms are (nearly) completely regular. The influence of meter in the sense discussed above is strong, as expressed by the rule/constraint in (5) and illustrated by the previous examples. Western music thus strongly follows the two fundamental ingredients of regular Rhythm (meter), repetition and alternation. We will discuss other types of music shortly.

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  Exploring the Language of Poems, Plays and Prose

  • Mick Short(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER 5 Rhythm and metre in the reading of poetry 5.1 What is Rhythm? The first thing to remember is that Rhythm is not special to poetry. We can perceive Rhythm in many things (for example, music, dancing, marching, digging, swimming). Even the cycle of the year's seasons can be seen to have a Rhythm. The perception of Rhythm, then, is a fundamental human ability. All we need to feel a Rhythmic effect is to perceive a regular grouping of events in some sequence or other (e.g. of sounds, physical actions, periods of the year). However, a very regular repeated Rhythm soon becomes boring, even irritating, as anyone who buys a small child a drum soon discovers. For interesting Rhythmic effects to occur we need some underlying regularity mixed with variations. Once a regular Rhythmical beat in a tune is established, it can be made more interesting by adding cross-Rhythms or by modifying the beat in some way (e.g. by adding extra beats to, or removing them from, the basic Rhythmic pattern). Similarly, dancing can be made more fun by adding variations to the basic steps, and our perception of the annual seasonal cycle is overlaid by our differing perceptions of how long particular seasons are each year, depending upon the weather, how happy we are, and so on. 126 Exploring the language of poems, plays and prose 5. 2 Rhythm in language Languages also have Rhythm. The underlying Rhythm of English is often said to be based on an assumption by native speakers that the amount of time between strong stresses is roughly equal.1 In English speech, each lexically full, or content word, has a major stress on one of its syllables, even if it only consists of one syllable. Single-syllable grammatical words, like prepositions (e.g. 'in', 'on') or articles ('a', 'the'), do not normally take stress, but grammatical words of more than one syllable (e.g. 'above', 'upon') will have a major stress.

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  Analysing Conversation

  An Introduction to Prosody

  • Beatrice Szczepek Reed(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Red Globe Press

    (Publisher)

  Time: Speech Rhythm 7 As we have seen, time impacts on conversation in more ways than one. Individ-ual speech events can be lengthened or shortened, and longer stretches of talk can be faster or slower. A third way in which talk is structured temporally is speech Rhythm, that is the organisation of speech into regular intervals of time. In this chapter, the notion of speech Rhythm is introduced, in particular the Rhythmic organisation of English conversation. Section 7.1 also presents differ-ent methods for measuring Rhythm. Section 7.2 goes on to look at how speech Rhythm can be investigated in spontaneous talk and provides exercises from everyday interaction. Section 7.3 presents research on speech Rhythm: Susanne Uhmann (1996) investigates beat clashes in natural German conversation, and Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen (1993) shows that speech Rhythm plays an important role for turn-taking in English talk-in-interaction. 7.1 Contrasts in speech Rhythm Many aspects of our physical existence, such as our heartbeat, breathing and walking, are Rhythmically organised. It is not surprising, therefore, that we also speak Rhythmically. Speech Rhythm is a feature of most languages; however, the way in which it is realised may vary from language to language. In standard varieties of English, speech Rhythm is accomplished such that speakers place stressed syllables at roughly regular intervals of time. As listeners we perceive this as creating a Rhythmic pattern, with every stressed syllable representing a Rhythmic beat. Take, for example, the phrase How was your trip to Belgium? In this phrase we may want to stress the syllables how, trip and Bel -: How was your trip to Bel gium? If a native speaker of English spoke this phrase fluently, the stressed syllables would fall on Rhythmic beats. This would mean that the temporal distance 139 140 ANALYSING CONVERSATION between how and trip would be the same as that between trip and Bel -.

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  Spoken English, TESOL and Applied Linguistics

  Challenges for Theory and Practice

  • Rebecca Hughes(Author)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  Recent research on speech Rhythm Current views of Rhythm in speech The failure of early experimental work to find acoustic evidence for the notion of isochrony has led to more current views of Rhythm such as those proposed by Dasher and Bolinger (1982) and Dauer (1983; 1987). They suggest that the classification of Rhythm should be based on the combinations of phonological, phonetic, lexical and syntactic proper- ties of different languages. Dauer identified the three main influences on Rhythmic patterning to be: (i) the complexity of syllable structure; (ii) the presence or absence of vowel reduction; and (iii) stress pattern- ing of a language. Dauer proposed that stress-based languages tend to have complex syllable structures while in many syllable-based lan- guages, there tends to be an absence of vowel reduction. In addition, Dasher and Bolinger (1982) also proposed that syllable-based languages tend not to have phonemic vowel length distinction. Another view of speech Rhythm is offered by Nespor (1990), who argued against the traditional classification of Rhythm based on her analysis of what she terms as ‘Rhythmically mixed’ or intermediate lan- guages. She defines intermediate languages to exhibit some properties of stress-timing and some associated with stress-timing. Nespor suggested that neither the strictly categorical view nor the continuum view can account adequately for the Rhythmic properties such as Polish, which is classified as stress-timed but which does not exhibit vowel reduction, a feature associated with stress-timed languages which have to compress their syllable durations in order to achieve near equal interstress inter- vals. Neither can the existing views on Rhythm account for Catalan, which, in spite of being classified as syllable-timed, exhibits vowel reduction, a property which is lacking in a prototypical syllable-timed language.

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  Pronunciation for English as an International Language

  From research to practice

  • Ee-Ling Low(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  8 Rhythm DOI: 10.4324/9781315814131-8

  The preceding chapter provided some details about stress in isolated words and basic facts about stress in sentences. In that chapter we looked at (1) syllables that receive primary stress; (2) syllables that receive secondary stress; and (3) syllables that are unstressed. We also looked at sentence stress, which tends to fall on syllables of content words. Recall that earlier in this book, particularly in Chapter 6 , we examined the concepts and examples of strong forms and weak forms, vowel reduction, sound linking and assimilation. These chapters have in fact provided us with some essential information about how differences exist between stresses that occur in individual words and those that occur in connected speech, and how these aspects operate at sentence level. This chapter will put these pieces of essential information together and take it one step further and look beyond them at the collaborative role they play in shaping the Rhythm of English speech.

  What is Rhythm?

  Rhythm arises from the occurrence of similar or ‘like’ events. For example, the ticking of a clock and the heartbeats of a healthy person are Rhythmic because they involve an alternating strong beat followed by a weak beat in a pattern that recurs. The concept of musical Rhythm is perhaps even more established than speech Rhythm and would be an appropriate starting point to talk about the concept of Rhythm. In music, strong beats separate notes into bars and, depending on the timing to which a piece of musical composition has been organised, the number of strong and weak beats in each bar varies. For example, in 3/4 timing, each bar will have the equivalent of three whole beats, likewise, in 2/4 timing, each bar will have two whole beats and so on. In speech, however, strong beats separate speech segments into feet. A foot comprises one stressed syllable up to but not including the next stressed syllable. In the example sentence I | WENT to see| JANE, we see evidence of the presence of just one foot marked below:

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  Roots of Lyric

  Primitive Poetry and Modern Poetics

  • Andrew Welsh(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Princeton University Press

    (Publisher)

  The steady musical beat in the chants gives a regular motion to the language of speech and the language of charm, car-rying them forward on a continuous Rhythm through time and action. The chant Rhythm, we speculated further, is a basic use of language that both reflects and directs social action toward communal goals, a force that seems never to be far away when this Rhythm enters poetry. In the Eskimo dance song, in the Navaho and Australian chants, in the prophecies of the Ghost Dance and of the Maya poet Chilam Balam, and in the poems of Ginsberg and Baraka, there is Rhythmically and thematically a strong sense of movement and action, a communal Rhythm enforcing com-munal participation and communal identity. The Rhythm of Blake's Tyger can be familiarly graphed in terms of a formal meter, but we also hear in it the questioning Rhythms of speech-melos and the sound-echoes of charm-melos caught up and carried along on the steady beats of a children's song. And in such songs the deeper powers of this old Rhythm persist: watch your daughters jumping rope to a skip-rope rhyme and you will see a social ritual, a dance. The Rhythmical situation in a lyric poem, then, is some-what more complex than just the syncopation of metrical pattern and speech Rhythm. There are also present other Rhythms derived from other uses of language—old, com-pelling forces whose purpose was to move. Modern poetry R H Y T H M has generally worked toward releasing those Rhythms by first dropping the conventional metrical patterns. But even in poetry with a recognizable meter (the trochaic pattern of Blake's poem, of the witches' charm in Macbeth, and of Ariel's song in The Tempest, for example) deeper lyric Rhythms are also active. The distinctive Rhythm of lyric, I suggest, is actually a complex interplay of Rhythms in lan-guage, a syncopation that crosses the Rhythms of speech-melos, charm-melos, and song-melos.

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  The Clever Body

  • Gabor Csepregi(Author)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • University of Calgary Press

    (Publisher)

  They surely move in synchrony with each other, but fail to react to the new circumstances. In a foreign land, those who fail to adopt the local Rhythm are immediately recognized as tourists or visitors. Conversation calls for a continuous adaptation to the demands of a Rhythm introduced by the partners. 5 The Rhythm is established and understood not only through the recurrent sound pulses, but also through a great variety of bodily movements such as the nods, smiles, frowns, and slight touches. The chosen Rhythm may serve several pur-poses. It may help to predict what comes next, hold the partner’s atten-tion, display an immediate non-verbal desire or reaction, or strengthen a bond between the speakers. By its nature, a genuine conversation is spontaneous and undetermined, even though it unfolds according to some kind of order. Beyond the selected themes and the partner’s will-ingness to listen and communicate, it is the commonly adopted Rhythm that brings coherence to the exchange of words. Rhythm is certainly a central element of the communication between individuals making music together, illustrated by a sonata recital. As the musicians interpret the part assigned to their instrument, they might play notes slightly faster or slower, or place more or less stress on them. The freedom of introducing subtle Rhythmic variations is, of course, not unlimited. Each player has to take into account not only the composer’s 94 | tHe clever boDy indication, but also the execution of the co-performer. The interpretation can unfold only if the pianist concurrently foresees what and how the violinist is going to play, and conversely, the violinist anticipates how the music created by the pianist will unfold. It is on the basis of memory of intervals that the players are able to anticipate how the music evolves. I have already referred to Alfred Schutz’s observations on cham-ber music performance.

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  English Speech Rhythm and the Foreign Learner

  • Corinne Adams(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Mouton

    (Publisher)

  The results of his statistical analyses show that a strongly marked Rhythm cannot become established unless the series of stimuli—in this case, stresses—is sufficiently long. However, careful examination of the Song of Songs revealed that this selection, which had the shortest sentences of all, was nevertheless the most strongly Rhythmical—a fact, says Classe, which suggests that a more regular distribution may compensate for a decrease in the size of the larger Rhythmic unit. 138 He concludes that although prose and verse may utilize different Rhythmic devices—for example, if the Rhythm is mainly founded on syllabic equality it will more nearly approximate to that of verse—there is no sharp line of demarcation between the two media. 139 Prose Rhythm, he asserts, is the more supple and varied, being unrestricted by the limiting nature of the traditional foot. 140 However, in the case of ordinary speech, it is seldom that a conscious effort is made to achieve Rhythm, and the various elements usually dis-tribute themselves so as to create a Rhythm with certain definite characteristics (which are those of the language) in the easiest possible way. 141 The purpose of speech, he says, is primarily utilitarian; so long as Rhythm helps, or at least does not hinder the necessities of an easy articulation, or the clear perception of the meaning, isochronism is prominent, although still other factors may interfere (such as phonetic nature of the various groups and their grammatical structure). When isochronism is incompatible with logical or phonetic necessity, it must give way before them and disappear more or less completely. 142 48 HISTORICAL SURVEY Nevertheless he is of the opinion, although he cannot prove it, that many of the idioms and popular phrases of the English language have only been evolved and have remained because their Rhythmic structure made them striking and easily remembered.

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  Discovering Phonetics and Phonology

  • Lynne Cahill(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  105 Part IV Rhythm and tune The last part explained how sounds are combined into syllables, morphemes and words. This part now looks at other aspects of pronunciation that affect syllables rather than individual sounds. Two main types of thing affect syl-lables in particular: stress and tone. They roughly mean the volume and the pitch, although it can be a bit more complex. In the first chapter of this part, I look at stress. I then look at tone in chapter 8 . The final chapter in this part looks at length and duration. These three things together are called prosody. The word prosody comes from the Greek, meaning ‘song sung to a tune’. The original Greek word refers much more to tone or pitch than to stress or Rhythm, but in modern linguistics it is used to mean all aspects of the pitch and Rhythm of an utterance. 107 7 Stress 7.1 What is stress? Quick quiz 1. Which word do you think has the most prominence when you say ‘You need to walk home’? 2. How do you know? 3. Are there any other differences in prominence among the other words? 4. Can you imagine saying the sentence with different words being more prominent? 5. How does that affect the meaning of the sentence? I have mentioned stress at a few points already in this book. For example, I said that vowels in unstressed syllables often become schwa ([ ə ]). I also talked a bit about the difference between the English verb and noun record : [ ɹɪ'kɔːd ] versus [ 'ɹɛkɔːd ] in Chapter 1 . But what exactly is stress? In many ways, it’s a bit like the idea of syllables. Just as speakers of a language know how many syllables there are in a word, without really knowing exactly what a syllable is, they usually know which syllable in a word is stressed, but they don’t really know what that means. Think about what you mean when you talk in a non-linguistic way about stressing something. ‘He stressed how important it was,’ for example. This means that he made sure that his audience heard or understood how impor-tant it was.

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