Although prosody is a quality of speech rather than singing, it is of vital importance to anyone setting text to music. The rising and falling pitches of a melody, along with rhythm and sometimes dynamic markings, impose a particular prosody on the sung text, that can appear natural or not, as a matter of musical choice. Musical settings of text can shift the emphasis of words in a phrase, or even help bring out alternative meanings hidden in the text. When setting tonal-language texts to music, a melodic setting could even contradict the text grammatically.