Zagreb, 13/11/2025 –  10 a.m.
University of Zagreb – Academy of Music
Trg Republike Hrvatske 12

Exploring the music of speech

a seminar by Fabio Cifariello Ciardi

As Leoš Janáček poignantly illustrates, an utterance conveys not only lexical meanings, but also the mood and feelings of the speaker. The use of prosody has been of interest to composers for a long time. However, compositionally implementing the communicative and persuasive power of prosody has always been challenging: the more strictly the speaker has to follow intonational contours or cadences, the less authentic and natural their voice will sound.
Another approach turns this limitation into an opportunity by moulding the musical material on the structures of pre-existing verbal expressions, rather than bending the qualitative aspects of speech to the creative will of the composer. This is usually achieved by translating the ‘speech melody’ into the corresponding melodic line. Less commonly, composers have even tried to translate the evolving timbre of language-specific phonemes, which lie at the root of speech.
The challenges composers face are not limited to extracting and manipulating prosodic information. Instruments and music notation ‘resist’ the composer’s desire for speech to be transcribed. Moreover, the referencing process, through which musicians and listeners encode such information, is far from straightforward.
In order to explore the tensions that emerge from the interplay between speech and music, the author has developed several computer-assisted composition tools which will be presented alongside examples of works ranging from solo pieces to orchestral compositions.

References
Cifariello Ciardi, F. (2021). Strategies and tools for the sonification of prosodic data: a composer’s perspective. In I. C. A. D. International Community For Auditory Display (Ed.), Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on Auditory Display.

Cifariello Ciardi, F. (2020). Dalla prosodia alla musica strumentale: una sfida compositiva. In Cardilli, L., & Lombardi Vallauri, S. (2020). L’arte orale. Poesia, musica, performance (pp. 1-324). Accademia University Press.

https://www.youtube.com/@cifariellociardi
https://soundcloud.com/fabio-cifariello-ciardi