Speech Prosody in Musical Notation: Spanish, Portuguese and English

This study uses musical notation to describe speech prosody in connected speech in Brazilian Portuguese and Mexican Spanish, using English as a comparison where needed. Through this research we establish the basis on which to expand our future work on speech prosody, from methodology to data collection and analyses, and then make initial observations regarding potentially significant prosodic patterns. This study shows that musical notation can inform us about: 1) the pitch ranges of the speakers in connected speech; 2) speech rate; 3) patterns of moraic and non-moraic syllables; 4) syllable timing; 5) intonation patterns, especially speakers’ tessitura. The methodology that we have developed in this exploratory study may help solve unpredictable patterns of speech prosody, especially in regards to intonation, and consequently lead to the improvement of current speech prosody models.