MUSICAL EVIDENCE FOR SYLLABIFICATION OF HIGHLY MORAIC STRUCTURES IN ENGLISH

This project looked at the use of highly moraic rimes in English through their behavior in music when sung by American singer-songwriters. Our target rimes were words ending in [ai] and [ail] (such as "fire" or "tile"). According to previous research, there is a direct correlation between linguistic and musical rhythm; therefore, by looking at the number of pitches an artist sung to each target rime, we were able to indirectly determine implicit decisions by speakers and subsequently learn about their usage of these structures. Our findings indicate that there are indeed two groups of artists, those who sing multiple pitches (indicating multiple syllables) for target words and those who only sing one (indicating one syllable)