A comparison between speech and musical rhythms: A case study of folk music in standard and northern Thai

Abstract

© 2020 International Speech Communications Association. All rights reserved. After the work of [1], nPVI is a popular tool used for investigating the relationship between speech and musical rhythm. Their work left an intriguing observation that music with lyrics will unsurprisingly reflect the same pattern as speech rhythm. Then, [2] tested whether popular music with lyrics between Standard Thai and Northern Thai would yield the same result as in [1]. The result did not confirm the hypothesis that the pattern of speech nPVI should be parallel to musical nPVI. They claimed that the incongruousness might have resulted from the influence of Western melodies on Standard Thai popular music. Thus, this experiment tries to find out whether genre can interfere with the relationship between speech and musical rhythm by looking at folk music in Standard and Northern Thai songs. The result showed that the nPVI values obtained from both speech and folk music of Standard Thai and Northern Thai are parallel. That is, the speech nPVI of Standard Thai was higher than the nPVI obtained from Northern Thai. In the same way, the nPVI in folk music of Standard Thai was higher than in folk music of Northern Thai. This result confirmed the hypothesis that speech rhythm can influence musical rhythm, and that genre is another factor that can interfere with the link between speech and musical rhythm.