English Vowel Duration in Textsetting

The rhythmic structure in music consists of alternating strong and weak beats and higher-level structure. Likewise, in language there is a similar structure: stress is usually an alternation of strong and weak beats. In texts that have both linguistic and musical structure, the two rhythms prefer to match but the alignment is not always perfect. This thesis investigates the effects of inherent vowel durations and voicing-induced allophonic length in two experiments using textsetting. This was done in order to explore the matching preferences between these linguistic tokens and slots in music. The results show that English speakers prefer to match shorter vowels with short notes and longer vowels with long notes in music. Both the tenseness and allophonic lengthening conditions are significant; however, the participants were more strongly guided by the tenseness of the vowel than the voicing-induced allophonic length.