Prosodic Alignments in Shadowed Singing of Familiar and Novel Music

Abstract

This paper presents a study comprising two singing shadowing tasks focusing on prosodic features of music. The first experiment investigated alignment effects in a song known to the participants. They sang the song before and after listening to a recorded version of it. The second experiment tested which prosodic elements are best preserved in replications of an unfamiliar song. Methods used in phonetic accommodation studies were adapted and used to measure the effects. Results show that convergence occurs in singing, but not in the same manner across all tested features. Additionally, participants preserved rhythmic patterns better than the tonal contour in the unfamiliar music piece.