Accent and beat matching: The correspondence of English stress and Japanese pitch in terms of textsetting

This study investigates the relation between speech accent and musical beat in two languages of different accent types. ‘Accent’ is intended to refer to any type of prominence: stress in English and pitch in Japanese. Previous studies on English textsetting indicate a rather strong matching of linguistic accents and musical beat strength. In L2 acquisition, Japanese learners of English tend to substitute pitch height for the ‘Strong-Weak/WeakStrong’ relation in English. This study examined whether Japanese High-Low pitch pattern would be equivalent to English trochee, and Japanese LowHigh pitch pattern would be equivalent to English iamb in terms of textsetting. Selected vocal music scores were examined; the results suggest that English stress and Japanese pitch are not equivalent in terms of textsetting, while they may be in language learners’ production.