The Influence of Interactions Between Music and Lyrics: What Factors Underlie the Intelligibility of Sung Text?

Abstract

This document provides a brief commentary on Johnson, Huron and Collister’s (2013) article entitled “Music and lyrics interactions and their influence on recognition of sung words: An investigation of word frequency, rhyme, metric stress, vocal timbre and repetition priming.” The commentary is written from the point of view of someone who is not only a fellow researcher in the field but also a former professional singer and singing teacher.  It summarises a previous study by two of the authors and the research of two further teams of investigators in the field before focusing on each of the authors’ eight hypotheses, findings and discussion in turn.