This paper aims to briefly present an overview of historical conventions for annotating South Slavic accentuation and test one experimentally. It comments on the studies of several descriptive linguists and musicologists who found their inspiration in musical terminology and used notes to describe the complexity of lexical stress in South-West Slavic languages. This contribution examines whether musical notation proves to be an effective means of representing the complexity of tonal features of South Slavic lects by reconstructing the nineteenth-century descriptions of Kajkavian, Čakavian and Štokavian stress patterns developed by Leonhard Gotthilf Masing. In the experimental part, native speakers of these three varieties were asked to identify the stress type after hearing the melody that was proposed as canonical representation of a stress type in the historical studies. The results show that the ability to identify accent type depends on listeners' dialectal affiliation. These findings are further interpreted in light of tri-tonal and quadri-tonal accent inventories that distinguish the tested groups of participants.