Highlights of the Museum

1. What actually happens when speech sounds rhythmic?

2. What kinds of rhythmic patterns occur in speech?

3. Do languages differ in their rhythms? Or do speakers of all languages produce essentially the same rhythmic patterns?

To find answers to these questions takes close analytical listening plus visual aids, like sound spectrograms and displays of devices like `beat extractors', to tell what speakers are really doing. We will try to make it easy for you to hear how people in various cultures have been able to make speech more interesting to listeners by aligning speech with rhythmic patterns.

People love to talk or listen to speech that exhibits simple rhythmic patterns - with or without being an actual song.

Anywhere you look, folks use rhythmically distinct styles for many special purposes - whether just for fun or for communal expression (from group prayer to marching songs), special styles for speaking to or speaking about God, or when people are doing physical work together. In fact, even many cases of ordinary `prose' speech will be shown to exhibit very strong periodic patterns -- at least for short passages.

Though the first examples below will be very obviously rhythmical, we expect to surprise you with distinctly periodic timing in styles of speech that are normally thought to be essentially nonrhythmical. Click on the pages below to see what we mean.

SOME EASY CASES: poetry, song, chant, work song

SPONTANEOUS GROUP PERIODICITY: `Pledge of Allegiance'

RHYTHMIC PROSE: preaching, acting, news reading

LABORATORY SPEECH: speech cycling, comparing languages