TIMING IN ESTONIAN FOLK-SONGS AS INTERACTION BETWEEN SPEECH PROSODY, METER, AND MUSICAL RHYTHM

Durations of acoustical segments were measured in four Estonian folk s ongs sung by a single performer, consisting of 152 verse lines, eight syllables each, with one note in the melody normally corresponding to one syllable in the text. The results were analyzed with regard to thr ee aspects: notation, meter, and speech prosody. Three songs out of fo ur are notated as isochronous sequences of 8 eighth notes per each ver se line; in one song, certain pairs of eighth notes are replaced by a dotted eighth note plus a sixteenth note. The results revealed a compl ex interaction between meter, musical rhythm, and speech prosody. Vari ations in durations of sound events reflect the Kalevala meter on whic h the songs are based, with average rises in a foot being acoustically longer than falls. The duration differences between rises and falls a re reduced in the so-called broken lines, which contain monosyllabic a nd trisyllabic words and allow for accommodation of short stressed syl lables at a fall of a foot as required by the meter. Semantically rele vant oppositions of word-initial short-long and long-short disyllabic units in speech are not kept completely intact in folk songs. Short-lo ng disyllables are treated in a different manner by the performer, dep ending on whether their initial syllable occurs at a rise or at a fall in a foot.