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Dear linguists, 
 
Thanks very much to those who responded to my recent query about prior 
research on relationship between the speech intonation contours of song 
lyrics (when spoken as text) and the musical melody to which those lyrics 
were set in song. There has been a fair amount of work on this question in 
tone languages, but we are looking for research on intonation languages, 
especially English and French. 
 
Based on the four responses received, it appears that little work has been 
done on this topic, and no empirical work at all. 
 
Steven Schaufele fcosw5mail.scu.edu.tw recommended looking at recitatives 
in 18th-century Italian opera, especially of some of the dialogues and 
private monologues/asides, in Mozart's “Marriage of Figaro”, where the 
musical line follows the normal rhythm & intonation of what the spoken 
Italian would be rather closely. 
 
Leigh VanHandel lvhmsu.edu noted thought that only a couple of older 
studies have looked at this issue, using selected phrases from one or two 
songs at best. 
 
Hugo Quene hugo.quenelet.uu.nl pointed me to this article on speech-music 
relations in a tone language: J. Baart (2004). Tone and song in Kalam 
Kohistani (Pakistan). 
In: H. Quene & V.J. van Heuven, eds. (2004). On Speech and Language: 
Studies for Sieb G. Nooteboom. Utrecht: Netherlands Graduate School of 
Linguistics. LOT Occasional Series; 2. ISBN 90-76864-53-5. 
 
http://lotos.library.uu.nl/publish/articles/000102/bookpart.pdf 
 
Finally, Edda Leopold leopoldmt.haw-hamburg.de commented that he did 
empirical work on F0- recognition on German in his diploma-thesis, and got 
the impression that theme-rheme relation the text is reflected in a kind of 
dominant-tonic relation in the prosody. 
 
Regards, 
Ani Patel