Tone and Melody in Cantonese

Abstract

Proceedings of the Thirteenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (1987), pp. 26-37

Expected Features of Speech under the Influence of the Iranian-Russian Interference at the Suprasegmental Level

“…35 For discussions of parallels and contrasts between music and speech see, for example, Fónagy (1981), Fujisaki (1983), Lerdahl and Jackendoff (1983), Chan (1987), Carlsen et al (1989), Scotto di Carlo and Autesserre (1992), Patel (1998), Patel et al (1998), Ross and Lehiste (2001), Arnold and Jusczyk (2002), Lehiste (2004), Martin (2004), and Dilley (2005 As we can see, the pitch is 440 Hz from the beginning of the sounding of this note to its end (which is from 1.09 s to 2.55 s on the time axis). In contrast to this, the pitches of words in speech are not kept constant, i.e., when a word is uttered, the pitch curve in the duration of a syllable is not a straight line (the only exception being the chanted call where syllables have constant pitches).…”

Automatic lyrics alignment for Cantonese popular music

“…However, there are some extracted onset times which are in fact not vocal. So, 4 Due to limited space, the experimental result is put in the appendix available at http://www.cse.cuhk.edu. hk/∼khwong/demo/lyricsalign/demo.htm.…”

“…Figure 9 shows the idea of the relative pitch matching of a Cantonese song. In our system, we follow the categorization of 6 tones of Cantonese into three groups in [4]: high, mid and low pitches. Each group is called lyrics pitch LP.…”

“…In analyzing the relationship between tone and melody, Marjorie categorized these 6 tones to three groups: high, mid and low, and showed that the lyrics were written to match the melodic contour of the musical phrase [4]. For example, if the lyrics consist of two Chinese characters: lou syu (meaning "rat") 2 in which a mid-pitch syllable is followed by a high-pitch syllable, and each syllable matches a musical note, the musical interval (pitch distance) of these two notes must be a ascending major second (whole tone) such as "DO"-"RE", "RE"-"MI", etc.…”

The Representation of Contour Tones in Cantonese

“…Researchers have observed that, in Cantonese lyrics writing for pop music, the low-rising 23 and mid-level 33 are interchangeable, whereas the high-rising 25 and the high-level 55 are interchangeable (Chan 1987;Ho 2006). The tones are interchangeable in the sense that, for example, if the tone 23 is compatible with a particular musical note, then 33 is also compatible; see the references cited for more musical details.…”