The Dual Audience Hypothesis, reconsidered
In Song Lyrics: the Dual Audience Hypothesis, I suggested that there are two audiences for song lyrics:
- A “normal” audience, that understands song lyrics as prose
- A “line-by-line” audience that understands song lyrics one line at a time.
This hypothesis is based on the observation that, in many cases, each individual line of song lyrics has its own emotional impact, implying that each individual line has to have its own emotional impact, somewhat independently of the content of previous lines.
At the same time, song lyrics are usually somewhat comprehensible as prose, where each line is understood within a context based on all the previous lines.
However analysis of actual song lyrics does cast doubt on the assumption that individual lines are processed completely independently of other lines.
There is usually some context that is required in order for the listener to respond emotionally to individual lines.
In some cases the required context is relatively constant over the whole song, in effect the required context is like a general background theme, and for the most part it is not rapidly evolving as might be case when listening to normal prose in a non-musical situation.
But in other cases there is some apparent evolution of context in a manner that is required to get full emotional impact for all the lines.
In the light of these difficulties, I now propse a variation on this hypothesis which avoids the need to suppose that two different audiences process music simultaneously.
Two Modes, but only one Audience at a time
I still suppose the existence of two different modes:
- “Normal” prose mode, where song lyrics are processed as if they are normal prose, with a full ability of the audience to process evolving context.
- “Line-by-Line” mode, where each line of the lyrics is processed somewhat independently of any other line, so therefore each line has to provide it’s own emotional impact, and where there is a reduced ability to maintain evolving context. (Additionally we might suppose that this reduction occurs primarily between different lines, so that the ability to evolve context within a single line is close to “normal”.)
But I no longer suppose that these two modes occur simultaneously.
Rather, prose mode happens if the listener happens to read the lyrics, or listen to them just spoken without any music, and line-by-line mode happens when the listener is listening to the lyrics actually being sung.
Comprehension
Under this hypothesis there will be no actual difference in the comprehension of the lyrics in the two modes, for the following reasons:
- In prose mode, the listener has a greater ability to maintain context, so they can easily follow the context required to understand the meaning of each line as it occurs following previous lines.
- The song lyrics are written so that they do not require the listener to maintain full semantic context from one line to the next, therefore they are still comprehensible to the listener in line-by-line mode.
Of course song lyrics without music are not that entertaining. The purpose of song lyrics is to provide emotional content that interacts with the effects of the music. As actual prose they are not (in general) particularly interesting, and necessarily they fail to make use of the normal ability to maintain semantic context from line to line and from sentence to sentence, so they are limited in what they can achieve as normal prose.
We could potentially ask if there is some sense in which lyrics can only be “understood” in line-by-line mode, ie where individual lines are only comprehensible because the context has been reduced by the effect of the music.
It is certainly the case that many song lyrics are somewhat nonsensical if read as straight prose – although in these cases we might deem them to be “poetical” (whatever that might actually mean).
Perhaps, in these cases the music is putting the brain into a mode where it “understands” meanings that cannot be understood without the music.
In practice we don’t have any direct awareness of any such increased understanding.
I think a better explanation of why song lyrics are or can be somewhat nonsensical is that the effect of music is to increase the listener’s willingness to tolerate the nonsensicalness, or to put it another way, to assume that the lyrics mean something, even though it remains unclear what that something actually is.