A corpus study of tone-melody correspondence in Cantopop, 2000–2020
department or school: Arts, Faculty of
department or school: Music, School of
data provider: DSpace
degree campus: UBCV
creator: Lee, Yin Hei (Jason)
issued: 2023-04-20T20:45:19Z
issued: 2023
related degree: Master of Arts - MA
degree grantor: University of British Columbia
description: 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 corpu…
aggregated CHO: https://circle.library.ubc.ca/rest/handle/2429/84374
note: A CORPUS STUDY OF TONE-MELODY CORRESPONDENCE IN CANTOPOP, 2000–2020 by Yin Hei Lee (Jason) B.A., The Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2021 B.Sc., The Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2018 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS in The Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies (Music, Emphasis Theory) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Vancouver) April 2023 © Yin Hei Lee (Jason), 2023 ii The following individuals certify that they have read, and recommend to the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies for acceptance, the thesis entitled: A Corpus Study of Tone-Melody Correspondence in Cantopop, 2000–2020 submitted by Yin Hei Lee (Jason) in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Music, Emphasis Theory Examining Committee: Leigh VanHandel, Associate Professor, Music Theory, UBC Co-supervisor Hedy Law, Associate Professor, Musicology, UBC Co-supervisor iii Abstract 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 sa…
has type: Thesis/Dissertation
date issued: 2023-05
is shown at: 10.14288/1.0431335
language: eng
degree discipline: Music - Theory
provider: Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library
publisher: University of British Columbia
rights: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
rights URI: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
scholar level: Graduate
contributor: VanHandel, Leigh
contributor: Law, Hedy
type: Text
identifier URI: http://hdl.handle.net/2429/84374