Syllabic meter in Arandic languages of central Australia

Setting words to musical rhythm is an attempt to match musical rhythm and linguistic units such as words and syllables in an aesthetically appealing manner (Dell & Halle 2009). This paper describes what makes a well-formed song in the traditional women's songs of the Arandic languages of Central Australia. The Arandic subgroup consists of 4 languages that are still spoken today, consisting of many more dialects. Drawing on the framework of generative metrics (Halle & Lerdahl 1993), I show that the poetic texts of this genre are syllable counting meters, where syllables match metrical positions and words match dipods/rhythmic cells. In addition, there are rhythmic constraints that affect how dipods pattern to make up a line. There is also a phonological constraint that requires sung syllables to be CV(C). However, most words in these languages are vowel-initial; and so in song there is morphological and syntactic misalignment. The resultant rhythmic-texts and their fixed pattern of repetition are then set to a melodic contour in varying ways, a process regarded as outside of the domain of verse design (Jakobson 1960, Kiparsky 2009).