Introduction
A comparison of rhythms in Jamaican
Creole speech and reggae music
Project’s long term goals
We chose to compare the rhythmic patterns of Jamaican Creole speech to Jamaican
reggae music, and to contrast these rhythmic characteristics to those of African
American English and jazz music (one of the most genuinely “American” musical
genres).
Christina G. Rozek ’15, Angela C. Carpenter (Linguistics), Andrea G.
Levitt (French & Linguistics)  Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences
 Summer 2013
This summer
We completed the analysis of all Jamaican Creole speech samples and partially
analyzed the reggae music samples.
Rhythm in speech and music
Rhythm in speech: “Patterns of timing and accentuation that characterize the flow of
syllables in sentences.” (Patel, p. 96)
Rhythm in music: Namely, “A pattern repeating regularly in time,” (Patel, p. 96) but in our
case, a pattern of long and short notes.
Types of speech rhythm
Hypothesis
Continuing research
Jamaican Creole is a syllable-timed language because of its
reduced consonant clusters and pattern of limited vowel
reduction.
We will finish our analysis of the reggae music and
calculate an nPVI for the durations of the notes. We will
compare it to the nPVI that we calculated for Jamaican
Creole speech.
Syllable-timed
French is a syllable-timed language
Syllables occur at regular intervals
Little unstressed syllable-reduction
Jamaican Creole speech will share rhythmic characteristics with
reggae music.
We plan to use the Jamaican Creole and reggae music
methods also to compare Black American English and
instrumental jazz music.
Stress-timed
English is a stress-timed language
Stressed syllables appear to occur at regular intervals
Unstressed syllables are reduced
Method
Mora-timed
Japanese is a mora-timed language
A consonant-vowel syllable, or just individual
consonants and vowels occur at regular intervals.
One way to measure these differences is by using nPVI (normalized Pairwise
Variability Index)
Jamaican Creole
Jamaican Creole, also called “patois,” is a standard creole that arose from a pidgin.
Pidgin: “A simple but rule-governed language developed for communication among
speakers of mutually unintelligible languages, often based on one of those languages
called the lexifier language.” (Fromkin, Rodman, & Hyams, p. 556)
Creole: “A language that begins as a pidgin and eventually becomes the first language
of a speech community through its being learned by children.”
(Fromkin, Rodman, & Hyams, p. 542)
Reggae
Many people are familiar with reggae through the work of Bob Marley, one of the
founding influences on the genre. However, since the rise of electronic sound mixing
technology, an industry has developed of what are called “producers.” Producers
create instrumental pieces with melodic lines (called “riddims”), and sell them to
singers who fit their lyrics to the producer’s melody.
nPVI (normalized Pairwise Variability Index)
Participants
Five contemporary Jamaican producers
Materials
Speech: We found interviews of producers on YouTube, using
natural speech samples as opposed to scripted speech. Much of
the research done comparing the rhythms of music and speech
from a culture rely on analyzing participants’ productions of
scripted text and measuring the lengths of notes in sheet music,
so our approach using natural speech and recorded music is
rather different.
Music: We selected two riddims from each Jamaican producer.
These were the original versions of the riddims, not the ones that
had been recorded over (found on YouTube and other internet
sources).
Analysis
Speech: We selected 20-30 phrases from each producer.
Each phrase was preceded by a 50-60ms pause, and we also
relied on intonation patterns and semantic content, rather than
just pauses, to help us make divisions between phrases.
For each phrase we provided a translation from Jamaican Creole
into Standard American English, and for each sound we indicated
whether it was a vowel or consonant and we provided a phonetic
transcription.
2.1
2.1
1
2.1
2.1
1
1
Large contrast
nPVI = 71
1
Small contrast
nPVI = 24
Questions or comments concerning the project should be addressed to:
Angela C. Carpenter, Department of Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences
Wellesley College, 106 Central St., Wellesley, MA 02481
E-MAIL: acarpent@wellesley.edu
50.5
47.7
45.5
41.7
Jamaican Creole is a syllable-timed language.
Jamaican Creole’s rhythm is a blend of English (stress timed)
and West African languages (syllable timed) and has retained
the West African syllable-timing stress pattern.
The stress pattern in Jamaican Creole produces an nPVI more
closely related to French and other romance languages than to
English.
A one-way Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) test shows that there
was no significant difference in the mean nPVI among our five
Jamaican Creole speakers, F (4, 112) = 1.82, p = 0.13.
Therefore, our participant population provides an appropriate
representation of mean nPVI for Jamaican Creole speakers.
Mean nPVI for Jamaican Creole, some European languages,
and dialects of English
70.0
46.0
Mean
nPVI
47.6
59.9
49.3
42.1
We isolated the main melody from the riddim and separated each
note.
Comparison of speech and music: We plan to compare the
relative durations of the music notes to the durations of vowels in
speech using nPVI.
52.5
Mean
nPVI
Results + Discussion
59.7
Music: The music must be instrumental, because the rhythmic
patterns in the melody of vocal music explicitly mimic the rhythm
of speech, and we are interested in how speech patterns might
implicitly affect the rhythm of instrumental music.
Jamaican Creole between-speaker variation
Above: A phrase of Jamaican Creole speech from producer
Don Corleon. The waveform shows pitch contour, while the
spectrogram shows formant values. We separated each
phoneme and notated it in IPA in tier 1. Tier 2 categorizes
each sound as a vowel or consonant. For our research using
the nPVI formula, we only measured the relative duration of
vowels.
Jamaican Creole, some European languages, and dialects of English
Jamaican Creole speakers
No significant difference in mean nPVI of five Jamaican Creole speakers, F (4, 112) = 1.82, p = 0.13.
References
Daniele, J. R. & Patel, A. D. (2008). The interplay of
linguistic and historical influences on
musical rhythm in different cultures. The
neuroscience institute: San Diego, CA.
Fagyal, Zsusanna & Yaeger-Dror, Malcah. “Analyzing
Rhythm: Best Practices in Sociophonetics.”
New Ways of Analyzing Variation 39th
Annual Conference. San Antonio. 14 Nov.
2010.
Fromkin, V., Rodman, R., & Hyams, N. (2007). An
Introduction to Language. Boston, MA:
Thomson Wadsworth.
Grabe, E. & Low, E. L. (2002). Durational variability in
speech and the rhythm class hypothesis.
Patel, A. D. (2008). Music, Language, and the
Brain. New York, NY: Oxford University
Press.
Patel, A. D. & Daniele, J. R. (2002). An empirical
comparison of rhythm in language and
music. Cognition 87 (B35 B45). doi:
10.1016/S0010-0277(02)00187-7
Patel, A. D., Iversen, J. R., & Rosenberg, J. C. (2006).
Comparing the rhythm and melody of
speech
and music: The case of British English and
French. Acoustical Society of America, 119
(5),
3034-3047. doi: 10.1121/1.2179657