What songs can tell us about language: rhythms in Filipino pop music

Kie Zuraw and Paolo Roca, University of California, Los Angeles, USA
Topics: phonology, language and music
There’s a Shakira song with the line un MO-ji-to, dos mo-JI-tos (“one mojito, two mojitos”). This line works because Spanish-language pop music allows strong musical beats-the bold, capitalized syllables-to be sung with either a syllable that is stressed in speech (ji), or a syllable that isn’t (mo). English-language pop music is stricter, and a line like one MO-ji-to, two mo-JI-tos doesn’t sound as good. Or take the opening line of a Gloria Gaynor song, at FIRST I was afraid, I was PE-tri-fied. It works because the stressed syllables first and pe get strong musical beats. If the lyrics were changed to se-COND I was happy, I was COU-ra-geous, the line would sound terrible, because the stressed syllables se and ra are sung on weak musical beats.
This kind of thing hasn’t been studied in many languages, and we wanted to know how it works in the Filipino language. Linguists don’t even agree on whether Filipino has stress! They do agree that some words sound more prominent on their second-to-last syllable, like the a of ábot, meaning ‘power’. Other words sound more prominent on their last syllable, like the bot of a different word abót, meaning ‘arrival’; but some linguists think that’s just an illusion caused by prominence at the ends of phrases.
We converted sheet music for 19 Filipino pop songs, in a genre known as OPM (Original Pilipino Music), into a database, and found that songwriters choose to put both types of prominent syllable-second-to-last and last-on longer notes and stronger beats, even after we controlled for the ends-of-phrases issue. Filipino does seem to have stress, and the way music and lyrics line up in OPM tends to respect that stress. Songs can tell us about properties of the language that are unclear from speech alone.