Tone–Melody Matching in tone-Language Singing

Abstract

Singing in tone languages has been the subject of a good deal of research, which shows that text-setting constraints are the heart of the solution to respecting both the linguistic and the musical functions of pitch. The most important principle in maintaining intelligibility of song texts seems to be the avoidance of contrary settings: musical pitch movement up or down from one syllable to the next should not be the opposite of the linguistically specified pitch direction. This chapter reviews the variations on this theme that have been described in the recent literature, including differences between languages and musical genres. It briefly considers how tonal text-setting might be incorporated into a general theory that includes traditional European metrics.