Linguistic and Musical Scaling of Cantonese Tones

Abstract

Two primary areas of current research on the relationship between musical tone and linguistic tone are the intelligibility of speech tone in sung melody and the quantification of cross-linguistic tone-melody correspondence. However, there is not much work on linguistic tones independent of sung melody in musical terms. This paper attempts to express the linguistic tones in speech as musical intervals (MIs). The linguistic scaling of tones in speech can then be obtained to compare with the musical scaling of tones in sung melody. Cantonese tones are adopted as a test case. Data was elicited from six Cantonese speakers using stimuli with a comprehensive coverage of the tonal inventory and three corner vowels. Fundamental frequencies of the tones were extracted with Praat (version 5.3.39), then time-normalized at 10% interval points across rhymes with ProsodyPro (version 4.3). The mean values of the interval points of two relatively level tones were expressed in terms of ratio, then matched with the closest MI on the musical scale. A compatible treatment of contour tones was also provided for the two rising tones. This paper demonstrates that linguistic tones in speech and in sung melodies can be mapped with each other in terms of MIs. Both linguistically and musically, MIs can capture the tonal space, the spatial relationship among different tones in a tonal inventory, and the flexibility of different tones. The viability of MI as a mean to understand linguistic tones in speech enables a linguistic scaling of speech tones to be mapped with the musical scaling of speech tones in sung melody. The exploration of the relationship between the linguistic tones in speech and in sung melodies hopes to extend the link between the use of pitch in speech tones and music