Trends in/over time: Rhythm in speech and musical melody in 19th-century art song

This paper presents the results of a quantitative study of the relationship between rhythmic characteristics of spoken German and French and the rhythm of musical melody in 19th-century art song. The study used a modified version of the Normalized Pairwise Variability Index, or nPVI, to measure the amount of variability between successive rhythmic events in the melodies of over 600 songs by 19 French and German composers. The study returned an unexpected result; songs written to texts in the two languages exhibited sharply diverging trends as a function of time through the 19th century. This trend is reflected both in the overall trends and in the trends of individual composers