Vortrag von Burkhard Meyer-Sickendiek, Hussein Hussein und Timo Baumann:

Tonality in Language: The “Generative Theory of Tonal Music” as a Framework for Prosodic Analysis of Poetry

Tonality is an organized system of tones (e.g., the tones of a major or minor scale) in which one tone (the tonic) becomes the central point for the remaining tones. The tonic is the tone of complete relaxation, the target toward which other tones lead. This relaxation is caused by the cadence: a musical chord sequence moving to a harmonic close or point of rest. This contribution focuses on structural similarities between tonality and cadences in music on the one hand, and rhythmical patterns in poetic languages resp. poetry on the other hand. We investigate two exemplary rhythmical patterns in modern poetry to detect these tonality-like features in poetic language: The Parlando and the Variable Foot. This exemplary analysis is particularly devoted to the “Generative Theory of Tonal Music” (GTTM) by Fred Lerdahl and Ray Jackendoff, resp. to Richard Cureton's theory of “Rhythmic Phrasing in English Verse” (RPEV) which is based on the GTTM. The GTTM and the RPEV both offer a very fruitful framework for the manual and digital analysis of these rhythmic patterns and for the specific “tonality” of (post-) modern poems. Different features including pause and parser information are used in this classification process. The best classification result, calculated by the F-Measure, for Parlando and Variable Foot is 69:1%.