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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
It has long been suspected that melody plays a more important part in the structure of a poem than the broken and irregular contours of verbal pitch-patterns would seem to indicate. The fact that the voice almost never settles for more than one-twentieth of a second on one pitch, the constant and rapid movements of the melody of speech, the impossibility of representing a verbal melody in musical notation—all have tended to obscure the relation of melody to rhythmical structure. It has been observed, however, that poetic melodies tend to arrange themselves roughly in patterns which coincide with the line or the phrase, and that these patterns are often repetitive. It has also been noticed that the comma-rise and period-fall tend to emphasize the rhythm and to prepare a sort of cadence for the end of a poetic passage. To these functions of melody in verse form may now be added a third: riming words tend to be pronounced on the same pitch.
1 The instruments used were the oscillograph, the phoneloscope (equipped with electrical pick-up and amplifier), the high-speed output-level recorder, and the strobophotographic camera. The readers were seated before a microphone and asked to read the poem as well as they could. They were given no idea of the purpose of the experiment.
2 It is perhaps unnecessary to explain that the characteristic of a sound which enables the ear to place it in a musical scale is the number of vibrations per second of the sound wave. The faster the vibration, the higher the pitch.
3 The close correspondences are all the more remarkable because the reader employed a range of nearly one and one-half octaves in reading this poem.
4 Another interesting feature of the frequencies observed was that in about three-fourths of the cases the riming sound passed through or very near submultiples of the characteristic frequency of the vowel. The characteristic frequency is explained by Dayton C. Miller (The Science of Musical Sound, 1916) as the “characteristic region of resonance which remains the same for all voices.” It is this that is supposed to give the vowel its peculiar quality. It has nothing to do with the fundamental pitch of the sound—only with the quality of the sound. Professor Miller's results were rechecked and restated by I. B. Crandall, “The Sounds of Speech,” Bell System Technical Journal (1925), pp. 25 ff., and by M. H. Liddell, The Physical Characteristics of Speech Sounds, published by Purdue University (1924–27).—The characteristic and its related frequencies are those on which the vowel may be pronounced most easily and most effectively. Does the tendency of the voice to seek this frequency mean that the good reader unconsciously seeks the convenient key, the natural frequency of the vowel he wishes to emphasize?
5 Op. cit., p. 25.
6 Verrier, Essai sur les Principes de la Métrique Anglaise. Scripture, Grundzüge der Englische Verswissenschaft (Marburg, 1929), which sums up his monumental researches into English verse. Morris, The Orchestration of the Metrical Line, (Ann Arbor, 1923). From Mr. Morris' tables of pitches, it is possible to quote the following mean frequencies for riming words:
swing 120 140
thing 123 177
blue 133 130
do 120 127
lie 138 141 (134) 203
rye 133 129 210
sky 218
Mr. Morris, unfortunately, does not describe his readers nor does he indicate the precise nature of the melodic pattern.