The Transcription of Speech Prosody

As we saw in Chapter 1 , prosody is not recorded in written language, with the marginal exception of punctuation marks. Before the invention of sound recording in the 19th century, it was not possible to hear exactly the same sound more than once. This simple fact applied equally to music and to speech. It was of course always possible for a speaker, or a musician, to repeat his utterance or performance, but the repetition relied crucially on the speaker/performer’s memory. The invention of writing made it possible to record the text of an utterance so that it was no longer necessary to rely on the speaker’s memory to transmit knowledge. The invention of musical notation had a similar effect on the transmission of music.