Pronunciation and expression. A preliminary study of the articulatory possibilities of Spanish consonants as expressive musical resources

Abstract

The study of pronunciation for singing has promoted the development of theoretical and analytical tools that allow to understand the making of speech sounds in musical performance. However, although this knowledge pledges the development of an intelligible vocal performance, not much has been investigated about the expressive potentiality of speech sounds in music (probably because they are often considered as meaningless linguistic units). The linguist Alarcos Llorach (1950) proposes that these sounds are capable of evoke affective and sensory contents when their articulatory features are associated with the semantic component of the word they form (e.g., the syllable tam in the word tambor ‘drum’ recalls the touch of this instrument). According to this idea, pronunciation and expression would no longer be understood as autonomous elements that contribute to vocal music performance, but as components of musical discourse that are interrelated during interpretation. In order to explore this relationship, we will study the main articulatory possibilities of Spanish consonants (doubling, prolongation, tuning, aspiration and variation of constriction) and how they are used as expressive musical resources in performatic contexts by singers and conductors.