In a tradition dating back seven centuries, the cries of street vendors have been quoted in musical compositions. The focus of this essay, however, is on the shorter period in which these cries became a subject of musicological, ethnographic and aesthetic interest: the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. — As a type of vocal utterance situated at the intersection of speech and song, street cries may raise questions about the relationship between music and language. How does prosody change when we raise our voice; How closely can speech melody resemble musical melody; Which melodic patterns can be identified; Can this type of utterance be adequately represented in musical notation? — The study of speech cries has been confined mainly to Paris, where the 'cris de Paris' were not only a defining feature of the urban soundscape, but also the source of long-standing iconographic, literary and musical traditions. Two early twentieth-century Dutch studies of the cries of Amsterdam can be placed within this broader historical context.
Lodewijk Muns (Thu,) studied this question.