Every language has its own peculiar music that allows people who are familiar with it to recognize it at a distance without knowing what words are being spoken. A recent study has shown quite convincingly that "music mirrors the tone patterns in our speech":
Aniruddh Patel of The Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla, California, and his colleagues used advanced computer software to analyse recordings of people saying different sentences in British English and in French. The software measures the pitch of each vowel, then works out the size of the jump in pitch between one syllable and the next.
For example, in the word "finding", the second vowel typically registers about 4 semitones higher than the first.
The researchers carried out the same analysis on musical notes from pieces by English and French composers such as Edward Elgar and Claude Debussy. The researchers avoided modern composers, because they would probably have been exposed to a range of cultures and languages.
Whereas previous work has compared the range of different pitches in languages and their associated music, Patel and his colleagues looked at the size of the jumps from note to note.
"We looked at how variable the intervals between pitches were, not just how variable the pitches were," says Patel.
The intervals in French speech and music turned out to be considerably less variable than their English counterparts. In other words, classical concerts and café chatter may sound rather smoother in Paris than in London.
In addition to its melodic patterns, language also has characteristic rhythmic patterns that distinguish it from other languages. French and Spanish are syllable-timed languages. Japanese has a similar pattern called mora timing. In all these languages, a certain number of syllables are produced within a certain time frame. English, on the other hand, is a stress-timed language in which a certain number of stressed syllables are produced within a certain time frame and all the unstressed syllables are squeezed in around them.
The poetry in these different languages reflects their natural rhythmic patterns. French "alexandrine" lines are twelve syllables in length regardless of stress, and Japanese haikus are seventeen syllables in full, again regardless of stress. English poetry tends to be strongly rhythmic, with a wavelike, up-and-down pattern of stress-unstress. The type of English poetic line that best reflects its natural rhythmic pattern is iambic, which goes dah-DAH/dah-DAH/dah-DAH/dah-DAH. That line was iambic tetrameter, because there were four stresses (four DAHs). Iambic pentameter, the favored Shakespearean line, would have five stresses, and so on.
If you are ever at a loss to know why a particular sentence you've written sounds "clunky," see if you can put it into an iambic pattern. More often than not, the result will be a nice, smooth, natural sounding flow.
