Cantonese tones and musical intervals

Abstract

This paper looks into how linguistic tones can be understood as musical tones. It provides a demonstration of the relationship between linguistic tone and musical intervals (MIs), which is especially relevant for Chinese languages since they mostly have relatively complex tonal systems, with more than a two-way tonal distinction, and contour tones. It tests whether MI gives any insight into the human language use of tone. Tones in the Cantonese spoken in Hong Kong (HKC) are used as a testing case. Six HKC speakers balanced for biological gender are selected for this project. The fundamental frequencies of the tones traditionally classified in the same tonal category are extracted with Praat, then time-normalized across syllables at 10% interval points of the rhymes. 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 provided for the two rising tones in HKC. Through demonstrating that MI is a viable way to interpret linguistic tone on a musical scale, it is found that contour tones can be compatible with the analysis of the relatively level tones. Also, MIs can possibly serve as a referential indicator of tone merger.