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.
Highlights
Composers and singers have to pay more attention to the relationship between words and melody when they write or sing in tone than in non-tone languages
The issues are (1) should we identify the pitch of tones by concentrating on the tone endings (Chan, 1987; Wong & Diehl, 2002) or should we consider other aspects such as the extreme pitch-value of a tone? (2) when there is more than one note performed on a tone, should we consider the note-transition based on the sequential note-initial, or the sequential note-ending (Wong & Diehl, 2002), or the note-ending-note-initial relationship (Mendenhall, 1975)? Different decisions may lead to various outcomes of tone-melody correspondence
These outcomes show that there is a clear effect of tone sandhi on the tone-melody correspondence in Chaozhou songs
Summary
Composers and singers have to pay more attention to the relationship between words and melody when they write or sing in tone than in non-tone languages. Yu (2013) introduced the possibility of grouping Chaozhou lexical tones at three levels, high, mid and low, in the writing of tone-melody relationship folk songs. In their analysis of Cantonese songs Wong and Diehl divided the six tones into three groups of high-, midand low-pitch by emphasising the ending point of tones (2002).
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