Only stone-death people, learning to speak, emphasis all syllables equally. Whenever you utter a sentence you use two kinds of emphasis:
Pronunciation is the act of saying a word
1. Stress
Stress is important when we speak because it adds rhythm. If you stress all words in an utterance you may cause misunderstanding or even sounds unpleasant. English speakers usually emphasize all their words when they are impatient or angry.
Image credit
One kind is almost mechanical. It is impossible in speaking to emphasize all your syllables equally. When normal people speak, the emphasis automatically falls a little more on one syllable than another. This is partly a matter of pronunciation.
Image credit
We will always pronounce 'music' slightly emphasizing the first syllable. In a sentence, "Listen to the music," this slight mechanical emphasis called stress or accent, falls on the first syllable of 'listen' and on the first of 'music' - the other syllables, including the "empty words" (as the Chinese calls them), 'to' and 'the', are unstressed, thus, "Listen to the music". "It is a shame he is not here." The stresses may not be equally heavy, but they are stresses. Stress has little to do with meaning.
Emphasis on Emotion
2. Significant Emphasis
The other kind of emphasis depends on meaning (in which we include emotion) and is conveyed both by the pace of your speech and the extra weight and length you put into certain syllables.
In the sentence "It is a shame he is not here", the words could convey anger, sympathy, or a lack of interest. The uninterested person would give all the chief syllables much the same weight and say them all at the same pace, evenly. The angry speaker would probably emphasize "shame" heavily and say the other words in a rush. The sympathetic person would speak slowly, putting extra weight and length into "shame".
As we speak, we do not realize how we say something, but the person on the receiving end will in all probability pick up on the way we pronounce our sentences and where we place our emphasis!
Source: English Language on pronunciation. EBH Joubert 2006
@frieda