Introduction – Tones and Songs

How do people who speak a tonal language understand the songs that are sung in that language? Pitch and contour are often the key features, perhaps the only features that distinguish tones in a language, yet pitch and contour are key features of music as well, where their interplay is known to musicians and musicologists as melody. Herzog (1934) even used the term ‘speech-melody’ to describe what linguists call tones, but in this article we will reserve the term ‘melody’ for the underlying musical interplay of pitch and contour in songs (and the term ‘melodic note’ for the musical pitch of a particular item), and keep the term ‘tone’ for the linguistic interplay.

In those languages where tones need to be correctly expressed in order to understand speech, what happens when people sing? How do the melody of a song and the pitch and contour of the tones interrelate?

In this study, we are going to look at two styles of traditional Tai Phake songs; in both of which understanding the words are of crucial importance. This may be a concept not easily understood by Western readers; as Mark and Li (1966) commented “Western concert halls contain many people who do not understand a single word of some texts being sung’.

I want to emphasise this point by the following illustration.