Samba and bossa nova: some aspects of the music-text relationship

Both Samba and bossa nova are genres of Brazilian popular music that are known all around the world and draw attention, among other things, because of their singing sounds similar to Brazilian Portuguese (BP) speech. This research intends to investigate the relationship between the prosodic patterns of lyrics and music in the two genres to corroborate the hypothesis that they are both based on BP prosody. The main hypothesis was investigated through three auxiliary hypotheses: i) the incidence of musical accent is higher on stressed syllables; ii) the musical accent from the melody is reinforced by the instrumental accompaniment; and iii) the relationship musical and linguistic accent is similar in samba and bossa nova. To this effect, we analyzed the following aspects of three representative songs of each genre: the pauses in interpretation and their relationship with some linguistic constituents of BP prosodic structure; the accumulation of musical accents in both the score and the interpretation and its relationship with the lexical stresses of the lyrics; the changes made by the singers relative to the score; the contribution of the rhythmics of instrumental accompaniment to reinforce vocal interpretation. Finally, we compared the two genres. The results show that segmentation and accentuation in the singing of samba and bossa nova refers to BP speech. The communalities between these genres rest on their similarities. On the other hand, the distinguishing characteristics of each genre rest on their differences (AU)