Re: sylable stress blues

Sean Cleary wrote:

How is stress indicated musically? one song I ran into had long short
notes, but most are not that easy to see.

Musical stress comes from a number of independent factors (which can sometimes contradict each other, so there's some art to the analysis). All other things being equal, each time-signature will emphasize certain beats in the measure and de-emphasize others. All other things being equal, a note of longer duration has more stress than a note of short duration. All other things being equal, a note that changes the pitch will have more stress than a note that duplicates the previous pitch. I think for most people, all other things being equal, a higher pitch will have more stress than a lower pitch, but I'd need to play with that one to be confident about it. In addition, certain musical genres may lend default stress to particular beats as part of the look-and-feel of the genre.

Here's an example of how these things can work out. Take the Star Spangled Banner, looking at it first as a piece of non-musical verse. To oversimplify, syllables in ALL CAPS are strongly stressed and syllables in all lower case are unstressed.

oh SAY, can you SEE by the DAWN'S early LIGHT
what so PROUDly we HAILED by the TWIlight's last GLEAMing

As it happens, these stresses also match the time-signature stress -- the first beat of each three-beat measure. But let's add something for note length. We'll put a plus sign in front of any syllable lasting longer than one beat, and a minus sing in front of any note lasting less than one beat.

oh SAY, can you +SEE -by -the DAWN'S early +LIGHT
-what -so +PROUD-ly we +HAILED -at -the TWIlight's last GLEAMing

Now let's add another plus sign for any syllable that's at a local maximum of pitch and a minus for a local minimum of pitch.

oh -SAY, can you +SEE +-by -the DAWN'S -early +LIGHT
-what -so ++PROUD-ly we +HAILED --at -the +TWIlight's last GLEAMing

Now we can start to see some places where the lyrics and tune don't quite march together. Think about that "by". Shouldn't carry much stress, linguistically speaking, but it's sitting there on a high note, which makes it more prominent than it ought to be. Mis-match. Compare it with the "at" -- which is in somewhat parallel construction, linguistically and logically -- but is passed over with about as little stress as you can get. What's the most stressed syllable in the entire couplet? "Proud-", another bit of a mis-match, but only in geting such a prominent place. What are the least stressed syllables? the, what, so, -ly, at, the -- function words and grammatical affixes. This aspect is a fairly good match between words and music.

This is a lot more analysis than you usually want to do. The place to start is with paying attention to the time-signature stress and note-length stress.

Heather
--
Heather Rose Jones
heather@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
<http://heatherrosejones.com>
Livejournal: hrj
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