Tone–Melody Matching in tone-Language Singing

Abstract

Singing in tone languages has been the subject of a good deal of research, which shows that text-setting constraints are the heart of the solution to respecting both the linguistic and the musical functions of pitch. The most important principle in maintaining intelligibility of song texts seems to be the avoidance of contrary settings: musical pitch movement up or down from one syllable to the next should not be the opposite of the linguistically specified pitch direction. This chapter reviews the variations on this theme that have been described in the recent literature, including differences between languages and musical genres. It briefly considers how tonal text-setting might be incorporated into a general theory that includes traditional European metrics.

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).…”

Analysing the relationship between tone and melody in Chaozhou songs

“…In the present study, the relationship between tones and notes can take the form of similar motion, oblique motion or contrary motion (Kirby & Ladd, 2016;Ladd & Kirby, 2020). These three terms are used to represent the constraints on sequences of two syllable tones and two musical notes.…”

“…This diversity urged us first to decide whether we should take into account the match between individual tones and corresponding musical patterns (Bright, 1957(Bright, , 1963Mark & Li, 1966) or the match of pitch direction between a sequence of tones and a sequence of notes (Kirby & Ladd, 2016;List, 1961;Mendenhall, 1975;Richards, 1972;Wong & Diehl, 2002;Yung, 1983). It appears that more studies have more effectively interpreted the tone-melody correspondence CONTACT Xi Zhang xz349@cam.ac.uk by employing the second approach, as noted by Ladd and Kirby (2020).…”

Syllable weight and natural duration in textsetting popular music in English

“…For example, intervals between attacks in music tend to scale with prosodic boundary strength. Third, linguistic pitch phenomena such as lexical tone and intonation often correspond with melodic contours (Devine & Stephens 1994;Wee 2007;Schellenberg 2012;Villepastour 2014;McPherson 2018McPherson , 2019McPherson & Ryan 2018;Ladd & Kirby 2020).…”