Does Language Determine Music in Tone Languages?

Abstract

I is conservatively estimated that between fifty and sixty percent of the world’s languages are tone languages—languages where pitch contributes to the meaning of words (Yip 2002). Tone in these languages is phonemic, which means that changing the pitch (or pitch contour) of a word can drastically change the meaning of the word. Since pitch is so closely tied to meaning in these languages and pitch is also one of the main components of music, the interaction of speech melody and song melody in tone languages has fascinated scholars for years. As may be expected, there have been a variety of methodologies, a variety of conclusions, and, significantly, a variety of assumptions. (In a previous article [Schellenberg 2009] I have discussed these different assumptions.) This paper is a closer examinination of one of the assumptions: the idea that speech melodies in a tone language dictate song melodies. On the surface, this seems a fairly reasonable assumption: if changing the pitch can change the meaning, the song melody must, perforce, preserve the meaning and, consequently, the speech melody. This assumption shows up frequently in the literature. Schneider (1961:204), for example, states that “speechtone [sic] and musical tone must be definitely correlated.” Rycroft (1959:28) says that “the setting of words to music in a ‘tone language’ either places limitations upon melodic freedom . . . or else makes word selection a more exacting matter.” Jones (1959) and Schneider (1942, 1950, 1961) devote most of their articles to trying to provide prosodic explanations for differences between speech melody and song melody in specific languages. This article looks at the collective evidence and concludes that language is not a determinant of music in tone languages, but rather that music accommodates language when it is convenient but is perfectly willing and able to override linguistic requirements. The following section looks briefly at the