Speech-song interface of Chinese speakers

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Pitch is a psychoacoustic construct crucial in the production and perception of speech and songs. This article is an exploration of the interface of speech and song performance of Chinese speakers. Although parallels might be drawn from the prosodic and sound structures of the linguistic and musical systems, perceiving and producing speech and songs involves higher cortical functioning. A close examination of Chinese vocal genres shows that in some song performance contexts, precise linguistic tones of Chinese speech are often loosely observed, even in the expense of their lexical function. Hence, it provides evidence for modularity in linguistic and music processing.