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I Speak, Therefore I Shred: New Research Explores Link Between Spoken Accents and Musical Styles

An intriguing new under-the-radar study implies that basic elements of music can be influenced by geography, or more specifically, how people in certain locations speak. Something as simple as a regional accent appears to have a strong rhythmic bond...

Correlations are often made comparing stylistic elements of musical genres and the environment in which those genres were born. Take early punk: The sticky floors and vomit-stained bathrooms of CBGBs and other early '70s Village punk spots go hand in hand with the "fuck you" attitude and volume of the music. A similar observation could be made concerning the dreary, poverty-stricken 1920's Mississippi Delta and the bleak, swampy sound of the Delta Blues.

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But these stereotypes are thin; there is no easily predictable causal relationship between musical styles and their corresponding regions – it's just another example of the chaotic cultural give-and-take that informs any artistic movement. Right?

An intriguing under-the-radar study that just appeared in the journal Music Perception implies that basic elements of music can indeed be influenced by geography, or more specifically, how people in certain locations speak. The article shows that something as simple as a regional accent appears to have a strong rhythmic bond with the corresponding music of that region. The authors, Rebecca McGowan and Andrea Levitt, analyzed the rhythmic nuances of both the specific English dialect and folk fiddling styles of Donegal Ireland, The Shetland Islands in Scotland, and Kentucky.

A common feature of language is the temporal relationship between neighboring elements in speech, which linguists call the "Pairwise Variability Index" (PVI). Accents from the American South are known for vowels that are stretched out in comparison to their neighboring components (try saying the word "lies" in a southern drawl and then in a northern accent…you'll notice the middle bit gets lengthened in the drawl though the consonant sounds stay short).

McGowan and Levitt applied the PVI to archived sound clips of Irish, Scottish, and Kentucky fiddle players speaking and playing traditional fiddle tunes. For the fiddle playing, the PVI measured the temporal relationship between neighboring notes rather than neighboring elements of speech.

Their results: the PVIs of the three dialects mirrored the PVIs of the three fiddling styles. In essence, their fiddles had accents. Irish accents have a lower PVI than Kentucky accents and Irish notes were generally more similar to each other in length than Kentuckian notes (The Scots were in the middle). The southern drawl of Kentucky speech has some of the same rhythmic characteristics as the southern swing of Kentucky fiddle playing. While fiddle tunes from the three regions look almost identical on paper, small rhythmic touches (like teased dotted eighth note rhythms and "swinging") make the styles easily distinguishable by ear. And that's what accents are anyway – they look the same on paper, but are set apart by small acoustic tweaks. It's amazing that these same tweaks may carry over to music.

It isn't clear if regional accents helped shape musical styles or vice versa, though it's probably both. It’s important to note that the music in this study is traditional – fiddle music has been around long enough in those three locations to really plant its roots. A lot of research over the past several decades has argued that music may have evolved along with language: Emotive speech uses similar pitches to music, the understanding of certain musical scales appears to be innate, and both language and music can have similar therapeutic effects.

I can’t help imagining the grating Austrian flavor of an Arnold Schwarzneggar violin concerto, or Christopher Walken’s uneven speech morphed into some kind of expressionistic drum solo. Weird.