Is there a strong correlation between speech rate and beat rate in English?

Question

Can speech rate in English be reliably measured through the beat rate? Beat rate analysis is now pretty standard, and a plethora of algorithms can reliably measure beat rate — typically in beats per minute (bpm) — of all sorts of formats (e.g. mp3, wav, ogg, etc). Speech rate analysis is typically done by transcribing recorded speech, and measuring it — usually in words per minute, and more robustly in syllables per minute (or per second, no difference) — but could perhaps be well approximated via the bpm measure. Can it? Does each word in English correlate to a beat via a single tonic syllable?

Answer 1

No. The two do not correspond. English is a strss-timed language, not a syllable-timed language, like French. Therefore, the beat is not based on each word but on the muscial melody of the speech, like a song. Some syllables or words are reduced to maintain the musical rhythm of the speech. The vowel "schwa" is used in English to reduce the length of vowels. Other syllables are lengthened. Usually the beat falls on the stressed syllable of the important information or new information in the sentence. For example: "I went to the store last weekend." The beat would fall on "went and "week" of weekend while "to" and "the" have their vowels reduced to a schwa. "I" and "last" keep their normal vowels. You could relate syllables per minute to beats per minute in French, but not in English.