JPF Home Page Forums General Messages Songwriter Message Forum Lyric to Music exercise

That is a valid question of which I cannot give you an honest answer. However, I was not really trying to focus on the accent as much as the speech patterns, where the notes rise and fall and the timbre of the voice. The different regions and dialects have variations on the words we use in the way we stress a syllable or the length of a word or syllable.

My point about all this was that I feel a way to find melodies that work well with a lyric is to take advantage of those indiosyncratic ways we say the words to evolve a melody from it. To make a fully formed melody you will end up exaggerating those idiosyncracies, but the advantage to doing it is you are not trying to shoe-horn words into a mismatched melody. You are, instead, letting the words themselves build the melody for you.