Feeling the Beat in an African Tone Language: Rhythmic Mapping Between Language and Music

Text-setting patterns in music have served as a key data source the development of theories prosody and rhythm stress-based languages, but been explored less from rhythmic perspective realm tone languages. African languages especially under-studied terms text-setting, likely large part due to ill-understood status metrical structure prosodic prominence asymmetries many these Here, we explore how language is mapped traditional folksongs sung Med?mba, Grassfields Bantu spoken Cameroon. We show that, despite complex varying structures within across songs, correspondences emerge between musical linguistic at level stem position, tone, structure. Our results reinforce notion that are present they play an important coordinative role movement.