Analysing the relationship between tone and melody in Chaozhou songs

Abstract

This paper uses corpus analysis to explore relationships between tone and melody in folk and contemporary songs in Chaozhou, a Chinese dialect with eight lexical tones and a wealth of tone sandhi. Results suggest that: (1) there is a high degree of correspondence between tone and melody in Chaozhou song; (2) tone sandhi influences tone-melody correspondence; (3) tones realised in context can be categorised into high-, mid-, and low-pitch groups according to the tone-pitch extreme rather than final pitch; (4) when single tones are performed melismatically across groups of notes, relationships between initial notes of successive groups shapes tone-melody matching.

Tuning the Musical Mind: Next Steps in Solving the Puzzle of the Cognitive Transfer of Musical Training to Language and Back

“…Studies with listeners of tonal languages (that distinguish word meanings by means of pitch contrasts) lend themselves especially well to examining the role of language for the musical mind (Cooper & Wang, 2012;Maggu et al, 2018). Because of a high correspondence between linguistic tone and musical melodies (Ladd & Kirby, 2020;Schellenberg, 2012;Schellenberg & Gick, 2020;Wong & Diehl, 2002;Zhang & Cross, 2021) and because of the crucial role of pitch in tonal languages (Yip, 2002), experience with a tonal language may have a strong positive influence on the perception of musical pitch (Bidelman et al, 2013;Chen et al, 2016;Wong et al, 2012;Zhang et al, 2020) and on singing accuracy in one's native tonal or non-native non-tonal language (Chen-Hafteck, 1999;Mang, 2006). This cross-domain transfer appears to be mediated by musicianship, given that a particular benefit for pitch processing arises for nonmusicians who are speakers of a tonal language (Choi, 2021;Cooper & Wang, 2012;Maggu et al, 2018).…”