Expressing Cantonese tone contrasts in musical intervals

Abstract

To record the principal phonetic characteristic of lexical tone, i.e. fundamental frequency (F0), Chao (1956) developed the 5-level transcription of tonal pitch variation with the use of slidingpitchpipes. When the pitch of the pitchpipe matches the pitch of the linguistic tone, the pitch values of a linguistic tone (the starting and ending points, also a turning point between the two if any) can be notated on a staff. The major advantage of this method is that the relativity of pitch, and thus the spatial relationship among lexical tones, could be recorded musically. The tones are represented phonologically on a tone scale with five numeric values from 1 to 5, a method commonly adopted for Chinese languages. Echoing Chao’s method of notating the lexical tones via a musical means, this paper explores how linguistic tones can be understood in terms of musical intervals (MIs) based on the data obtained in Cantonese. Six Cantonese speakers balanced for biological gender are selected. The F0 of the tones traditionally classified in the same tonal category are extracted with Praat (version 5.3.39) (Boersma and Weenink 2013), then time-normalized across syllables at 10% interval points of the rhymes with ProsodyPro (version 4.3) (Xu 2012). The mean values of the interval points of two relatively level tones are expressed in terms of ratio which is then used to match with the closest MI on the musical scale. A compatible treatment of contour tones is also provided for the two rising tones. This paper demonstrates that the pitch levels of Cantonese tones correspond to MIs, given the converging ranges of MIs for different speakers and similar MIs of different tone pairs for different speakers. It shows that MIs are able to capture the tonal space, the spatial relationship among different tones, and the flexibility of tones in a tonal inventory. Also, MIs can possibly serve as a referential indicator of tone merger. For tone-melody mapping, results of this paper are comparable with those of earlier studies on the tonal transitions in Cantonese vocal songs (e.g. Ho 2009 and Chow 2012). The demonstration of the relationship between linguistic tone and MIs is especially relevant for the examination of languages having a relatively complex tonal system, i.e. with more than a twoway tonal distinction and contour tones. It opens a new window to understand how linguistic tones and musical tunes are linked to each other.