Within the long-standing, and yet still lively debate over the origin of Romance poetry in general, and of regular rhyme in particular, one key element appears to have been often overlooked: music. Although it is very well known that Troubadour lyric poems were meant to be sung, their melodic form has so far indisputably been considered to be independent from the formal structure of the texts. However, a radical reconsideration of this common belief, based on a brand-new approach that takes orality into account, leads to the opposite conclusion that regular rhyme schemes, at their origins, were indeed closely related to the musical form of the songs. Linking rhymes to music may therefore represent a potentially decisive argument in the quest for the origin of Romance lyric poetry. For, even if rhymes and rhyme schemes may be found in many different and independent literary traditions, their structural relation to musical form is by far much rarer, hence offering a much more specific hint about the origin of Vernacular lyric forms, which are based on regular rhyme schemes. Tracing this metrical-musical technique back to its roots, may validate once and for all one of the two main theories competing around the origin of Vernacular lyric poetry, namely the Medieval Latin and the Andalusian Arabic theory.
