Melody in speech and music
Mathias Scharinger · 2022
Melody - in its basic sense - is an orderly sequence of pitches. As such, melody refers both to tone sequences in music, and pitch sequences (or intonation contours) in speech. There have been numerous attempts to account for melodies in speech and music in a similar way. However, the characteristics and constraints of melodies in the two domains also differ. Is it thus still possible that melodies in speech and music can be described within the same formal system? Is it feasible to consider melodies in speech and music to be based on a descriptive continuum, where clear instances of musical melodies and clear instances of speech melodies lay on opposite ends, and where pitch sequences that oscillate between speech and music will fall on middle regions of such a continuum? In this chapter, I attempt to provide a unifying framework for the description of musical melodies and speech melodies. The underlying assumption is that melodies in speech and music share organizational principles by which they are perceived as “melodious”.