About the author
Teresa Proto is a post-doctoral researcher in Linguistics and German Philology. Her main field of interest is interaction between musical and linguistics structures in vocal music.
“I am a postdoctoral researcher in the project Knowledge and Culture, subproject Text setting. The expression ‘text setting’ denotes the process of aligning textual units to musical units in creating and/or performing vocal music. What is interesting about text setting is that native speakers (who are active participants in their singing traditions) have clear intuitions as to how to map a text onto a tune, despite the lack of explicit training and the difficulty implied by the coordination of the various abilities involved. How do people do this? My contribution to answering this question consists of an empirical study of individual singing idioms and natural languages”.
2014-present: Post-doctoral Researcher in the NWO Horizon Project “Knowledge and Culture” (Leiden University & Meertens Instituut).
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Key publications: Proto, T. (2015) ‘Prosody, melody and rhythm in vocal music: The problem of text-setting in a linguistic perspective’. In: B. Köhnlein / J. Audring (eds.), Linguistics in the Netherlands 2015 [AVT 32]. Amsterdam: Benjamins.