Abstract:

Composers often face the task of composing melodies for given texts such as religious hymns, poetry or the libretto of an opera. A plausible point of departure for writing melodies for a text is to study the prosody of the text as spoken either naturally or dramatically. In this paper we introduce PROSE: a system for aiding such study. The system extracts the prosody of a spoken signal and (re)synthesises it at various resolutions. The main advantages of using PROSE over simply listening to the spoken signals are that composers can focus on prosodic auditory information detached from the meaning of the text and can assess this information at various resolutions. Also, the analysis data can be plotted for visual assessment and/or mapped onto musical parameters.