Out-of-Key Notes and On-Beat Silences as Prosodic Cues in Sung Sentences

Violations of musical syntactic expectancies such as out-of-key notes are known to interact with linguistic processing, due to shared syntactic integration resources, located in Broca’s area. As these are syntactic integration resource, researchers have assumed that such events negatively affect the processing of language and that they do not affect semantics. However, the results of this study challenge both assumptions. An online listen-experiment shows that out-of-key notes sometimes do affect semantics. Thirty participants listened to thirty sung sentences in three conditions and rated the plausibility of literal and colored (emotional, ironic or metaphoric) interpretations. Out-of-key notes significantly affected these ratings. Loud rests (on beat silences) did not yield a similar effect.