Tone-Melody Relationship in Cantonese

Abstract

Cantonese lyrics are found to adhere to the pitch contours and relative pitch heights of the tones, in or-der to preserve in the lyrics the tonal values of the words. A series of meta-analyses over a selection of Cantonese children’s songs was performed; it investigated (i) the distribution of lexical tones in correlation with musical melody; (ii) the relationship between tonal pitch and melody; and (iii) how contour tones are dealt with in mapping lyrics with music. This study showed that the writing of lyrics in tonal languages is not as free as in non-tonal languages, and takes into account the lexical tones, in order to preserve the tonal distinctions between words.