Open Collections

Lee, Yin Hei (Jason)

University of British Columbia

Cantonese is a tone language, meaning that differences in pitch can contribute to different word meanings. In songs written in a tone language, song melody and linguistic tones should ideally correlate with each other, in order to maintain intelligibility of the lyrics. The topic of tone-melody correspondence has been examined by music and language scholars in many cultures and genres, including Cantonese popular music (hereafter Cantopop). However, previous scholars who examined the topic of tone-melody correspondence in Cantopop have not supported their arguments with evidence from a large and representative sample. In many cases, researchers only looked at select passages in songs, but without following a rigorous methodology for selecting the passages or even the songs themselves. As a result, their findings are partial and might not accurately describe how Cantopop lyrics are written to ensure the intelligibility of the tones and the syllables. In this study, I construct a 105-song Cantopop corpus. This sample size is much larger than those used in previous studies, and the selection criteria for the songs are clearly defined to ensure representativeness. Using data from this corpus, I revisit claims and observations made in previous research on tone-melody correspondence in Cantopop. In Chapter 4, I challenge and supplement the endpoint principle, a widespread assumption in the study of tone-melody correspondence in Cantopop regarding the text-setting treatment for syllables with contour tones. In Chapter 5, I propose a refined way of describing the text-setting constraint for Cantopop in relation to the two types of oblique motion between speech and song melodies. In addition, to explain the opposite directionality of oblique II bigrams, I explore the role of pitch range in Cantopop text-setting, which was overlooked in previous studies. This study contributes to the study of Cantopop and tone-melody correspondence by offering a large and representative corpus of the genre and providing new insights about observations that have been previously overlooked.

Text

2023-04-20

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/84374

Music - Theory

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/