Page 203 - Communication Processes Volume 3 Communication Culture and Confrontation

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Say it in Singing! ProSodic

PatternS and rhetoricS in the

Performance of grindmill SongS

Bernard Bel, Geneviève Caelen-Haumont
and Hema rairkar

Experimental studies of reading and spontaneous speech analysis
have brought into light the role of tonal patterns (an aspect of speech
prosody) in conveying rhetoric aspects of verbal communication
hitherto overlooked by classical linguistic analysis. Speakers tend to
rely on tonal patterns—basically excursions of the fundamental pitch
‘F0’—to make their message ‘known’, ‘believed’ and to instil a subjective
dimension into it.
It makes sense to hypothesize that similar strategies might be
worked out by singers when the focus of their performance is a sub-
jective re-interpretation of textual and symbolic contents of the lyrics.
This hypothesis is checked here in the context of Maharashtrian
grindmill songs. In the absence of a system of codification for tunes
and lyrics, performers feel free to explore melodic (tonal/temporal)
structures emphasizing the meaning of words, or conveying additional
meanings that the core lyrics did not articulate. The latter is part of
an individuation process that would otherwise be difficult to trace in
group performance.

Singing at the Grindmill

The tradition of singing at the grindmill displays a remarkable con-
tinuity between ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ thought processes and