Perception of vowel quantity in sung Estonian

This paper investigates representation and perception of contrastive vowel length in Estonian songs. In speech, vowels in Quantity 1 (short; Q1) and Quantity 2 (long; Q2) are correlated with s1=s2 duration ratios of 2:3 and 3:2, respectively (Lehiste, 1960). However, in atypical timing contexts such as song, adhering to speech ratios may not always be feasible. I aim to determine whether native Estonian speakers perceive vowel quantity in song adhering to the same criteria that they are shown to use in speech. A small corpus exploration suggests that there is a general trend for composers to assign Q1 words to shorter:longer note pairs and Q2 words to longer:shorter pairs, without specific adherence to the ratios typical of speech. Given that text setting in musical composition does not necessarily follow expected speech ratios, a perception study was implemented with the purpose of determining whether listeners nevertheless perceive vowel quantity in song according to the speech ratios. Native Estonian listeners were asked to identify sung bisyllabic nonce words of varying ratios as either Q1 or Q2, and results showed that participants identify sung tokens according to the same ratios as they do in speech. This suggests that in the absence of clues from lexical information, native listeners use the same perceptual tools from speech to identify vowel length in song, even though words in composed music are not necessarily always presented in the same way.

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