It's well established that vowel length was phonemic in Latin, and that it played an important role in poetic verse. It seems probable to me that it also mattered when singing, but do we have evidence that it was? Or evidence to the contrary?
Some current languages drop some otherwise phonetic aspects of their pronunciation when singing. For instance, while Cantonese or Vietnamese, which are tonal languages, do take care to match tones with melodic contours in songs, Mandarin Chinese does not, and tones are largely ignored when singing. Japanese has phonemic vowel length, and largely keeps it while singing, but things occasionally get squeezed or stretched to fit with the music's rhythm, and geminated consonants occasionally get replaced with a lengthening of the preceding vowel (as you cannot carry a lengthy melodic note on a consonant).
Observed Song Download
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So, I could imagine Latin song lyrics strictly keeping vowel length and rhythmic length in sync, or maybe using syllable length the way poetry does, or starting there but occasionally bending the rules a little, or doing away with that altogether and letting the musical rhythm dominate. But do we actually know how such things were handled in classical times?
I know of no songs preserved from the age of classic Latin, but have not looked into the matter to know whether any exist. I do know that we have some Greek songs set to music from at least the Hellenistic Greek period, like the Seikilos Epitaph. In this song, the match between the Ancient Greek pitch accent and melody and between vowel length and note length is excellent. The match between note length and syllable weight is perfect.
As best we understand it, Latin had more of a stress accent than a pitch accent. The music could have replicated stress more with modulation in rhythm than with the type of changes in melody that were necessary for the Seikilos Epitaph and the phonology of Koine Greek. As in English, the match between stress and rhythm need not be perfect, and it is more of a matter of not forcing words into an unnatural stress rhythm than having actually to reproduce the spoken stress rhythm and intonation. I would assume the same possibilities apply to how much vowel length needed to be respected in Latin. My feeling for Mandarin is that although tone melodies can largely be ignored, stress rhythms still must be respected.
In a quick search, the earliest Latin music I could find were the hymns attributed to Ambrose of Milan from the 4th Century CE. Apparently, these were written in Iambic dimeter and so had to take into account vowel and syllable length in their composition even at this quite late date in Latin. This composition, however, could have been a matter of using preserved knowledge of poetic meters, rather than respecting existing spoken rhythms. Especially if they were inspired by older Greek models.
Here is a one of the songs, Aeterne rerum conditor. To my ear, there is not a close respect for vowel or syllable length as was done for the Seikolos Epitaph. However, there is some concordance beyond what is necessary for the stress and maybe driven by the poetic meter. Again, at this late date, I am not sure how much vowel length was actually respected in speech. If I recall correctly, some mergers had already happened in North African Latin, where s and s had merged in pronunciation in the 4th century.
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Vocal culture is the cornerstone of spoken language, but is not unique to humans1,2,3,4,5. Like humans, songbirds acquire their vocal repertoire via imitation (i.e., vocal learning)6,7,8,9, a process that can give rise to local dialects that persist over hundreds of generations10,11. However, the repertoire of vocal learning birds also has a strong genetic component11,12,13. Across populations, innate biases in song perception, production, and learning sustain species-specific song repertoires13,14,15,16. Canaries, for example, will faithfully imitate songs of abnormal combinatorial structure, but later, as they reach maturity, alter their songs to match a species typical song syntax to which they have not been exposed17. Similarly, zebra finch males (females do not sing) that are trained with random combinatorial transitions of syllable types will generate combinations that are biased toward the species typical18,19. Innate biases may unfold at the scale of generations, too; the descendants of isolated zebra finch tutors, who produce aberrant songs, produce increasingly species typical songs2,19.
Theoretically, vocal imitation should drive song repertoire convergence within groups and divergence across groups20,21,22. Meanwhile, innate biases in imitation might constrain drift. In reality, however, zebra finch songs remain highly diverse within groups and vary only mildly across them22. We do not know whether this diversity serves any function in domesticated zebra finches, but high similarity between songs could potentially generate impoverished communication systems that convey little information about individual identity23,24. In wild songbirds, across species, and even subspecies, the magnitude of individual song variability differs strongly, often for no apparent reason. For example, the songs of the wild Australian zebra finch (Taeniopygia guttata castanotis) are much more variable among individuals than those of the closely related wild Timor zebra finch (Taeniopygia guttata guttata)25. This variability persists despite the fact that they live in similar climates and have similar social organization.
Here we test how a rich polymorphic repertoire of song syllables is sustained during cultural transmission26 in the Australian zebra finch. We quantify song polymorphism using novel measures of vocal states and acoustic diversity, for studying the statistics of song imitation in a large colony. We find that the polymorphic repertoire is sustained by pupils spontaneously increasing song diversity when tutors have low-diversity songs, and imitating with greater fidelity when tutors have high-diversity songs, a process we call balanced imitation.
a 24 song tutoring lineages. All tutors had pupils in more than a single clutch. Each node represents one individual animal. Node shape represents pupils from the same clutch. Tutor nodes are presented on the bottom and pupil nodes on the top. Similarity scores are presented as quartiles (green for best imitations and red for poorest). Lineages are sorted according to the mean similarity between tutor and pupils from highest (top) to lowest (bottom). b, c Examples of song imitations from tutor AQ12 with a low similarity family (b) and from tutor DG1 with a high similarity family (c). Imitation outcomes are presented as percent acoustic similarity estimates on each sonogram. Red bars outline the repeated song motifs of the tutors. Source data for this figure is in Supplementary Data File 1.
Our measures up to now summarize the distribution of vocal states within a song. We next looked at each vocal state separately and measured how frequencies (abundances) of vocal states are imitated. In prior studies, we noted that vocal imitation in zebra finches is inversely related to model abundance. That is, too much exposure to a tutored song could inhibit learning31. Here we test if this is the case also for abundances of vocal states within a song.
We superimposed these empirically determined pitch intervals (for top and bottom influence) on ranges of mean song pitches obtained in a database of four zebra finch colonies including the current one, and shaded the intervals values green (presumably top influence) and red (presumably low influence; Fig. 7f). We then did the same for frequency modulation (Fig. 7g), and Weiner entropy (Fig. 7h). Across the colonies, the distribution of mean song features was to a large extent confined within the range of high influence in our colony. Therefore, the range of mean feature values of highest imitation influences in our colony, but not of lowest influences, seems consistent across zebra finch colonies. This range, in turn, can be explained by balanced imitation as high influences are associated with high tutor song diversity. In sum, this outcome is consistent with the notion that over generations, songs of high feature diversity are more influential, and therefore shape the overall distribution of mean song features in a similar manner across colonies.
It would be interesting to test if balanced imitation parameters are different across species. Variation in the intensity of the trend to sustain high song diversity and that of the trend to imitate songs accurately could lead to equilibriums that differ according to species and possibly even the ecological conditions in which a species lives. Perhaps species with songs that are similar across individuals engage in weak balanced imitation and vice versa. For example, to explain why the songs of the Timor zebra finch are much more similar across individuals compared to the Australian zebra finch25, we speculate that perhaps a weaker balanced imitation gain in the Timor zebra finches (compared to Australian zebra finches) could potentially increase the odds of extinction of rare song elements, driving the stronger convergence observed in songs across individuals.
Regardless of possible prevalence across species, accounting for balanced imitation in zebra finches might be necessary in order to properly interpret vocal learning outcomes. This is particularly important because mechanisms of vocal learning are studied extensively in Estrildid finches, among which song learning outcomes vary considerably across individuals. In part, this variability is associated with factors like genetics and with tutoring mismatches12,36. Our results indicate that, in addition, deviations from tutor song through reorganization and transformation of copied vocal sounds may be driven by an inclination to optimize song diversity. This can be regarded as a discrete form of error correction during song learning. That is, balanced imitation involves correcting errors from states of minimal (and perhaps also maximal34) diversity. In the framework of error correction37, the developmental question is when and how the vocal learning bird balances between error correction exclusively in reference to tutor sound to error correction in reference to a state of its own sound diversity. A better understanding of this balance and possible transition could reveal the mechanism through which a species-specific level of cultural song diversity is determined23. 152ee80cbc
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