Student work on language and music
Several of my students have worked on how speech sounds are produced when we sing and how listeners perceive them.
Marly Mageau wrote her master’s thesis on how listeners perceive accents in song and she also performed an acoustic analysis of native and non-native singers. Ashley Sokalski’s undergraduate thesis followed up on Mageau’s work. Both studies are described in Mageau, Mekik, Sokalski, and Toivonen (2019).
In his undergraduate thesis, Ryan Stoparczyk explored whether listeners are more likely to classify a song as belonging to the musical genre of reggae if the singer sings in a Jamaican accent than if the singer uses another variety of English.
Nicole Gilroy investigated tense and lax vowels in textsetting in her master’s thesis, and she found that listeners preferred to match the length of vowels and musical notes. Specifically, listeners prefer tense vowels on long notes and lax vowels on short notes.