{"title":"Cantopop and Speech-Melody Complex","authors":"Edwin K. C. Li","doi":"10.30535/MTO.27.1.6","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"It is generally accepted that speech and melody are distinctive perceptual categories, and that one is able to overcome perceptual ambiguity to categorize acoustic stimuli as either of the two. This article investigates native Cantonese speakers’ speech-melody experience of listening to Cantonese popular songs (henceforth Cantopop songs), a relatively uncharted territory in musicological studies. It proposes a speech-melody complex that embraces native Cantonese speakers’ experience of the potentialities of speech and melody before they come into being. Speech-melody complex, I argue, does not stably contain the categories of speech or melody in their full-blown, asserted form, but concerns the ongoingness of the process of categorial molding, which depends on how much contextual information the listeners value in shaping and parsing out the complex. It follows, then, that making a categorial assertion implies a breakthrough of the complex. I then complicate speech-melody complex with the concept of “anamorphosis,” borrowed from the visual arts, which calls into question the signification of the perceived object by perspectival distortion. When transferred to the sonic dimension, “anamorphic listening,” I suggest, is not about at which point a sonic object becomes “distorted” but is about one’s processual experience of negotiating the hermeneutic values in their different hearing-ases. The listener engages, then, in the process of molding and remolding, creating and negating, the two enigmatic categories. Through my analysis of two Cantopop songs and interviews with native Cantonese speakers, I suggest that Cantopop may invite an anamorphic listening, and that more broadly, it is an important, yet under-explored, genre with which to theorize about the relationships between music and language.","PeriodicalId":44918,"journal":{"name":"Music Theory Online","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.4000,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Music Theory Online","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.30535/MTO.27.1.6","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"MUSIC","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
It is generally accepted that speech and melody are distinctive perceptual categories, and that one is able to overcome perceptual ambiguity to categorize acoustic stimuli as either of the two. This article investigates native Cantonese speakers’ speech-melody experience of listening to Cantonese popular songs (henceforth Cantopop songs), a relatively uncharted territory in musicological studies. It proposes a speech-melody complex that embraces native Cantonese speakers’ experience of the potentialities of speech and melody before they come into being. Speech-melody complex, I argue, does not stably contain the categories of speech or melody in their full-blown, asserted form, but concerns the ongoingness of the process of categorial molding, which depends on how much contextual information the listeners value in shaping and parsing out the complex. It follows, then, that making a categorial assertion implies a breakthrough of the complex. I then complicate speech-melody complex with the concept of “anamorphosis,” borrowed from the visual arts, which calls into question the signification of the perceived object by perspectival distortion. When transferred to the sonic dimension, “anamorphic listening,” I suggest, is not about at which point a sonic object becomes “distorted” but is about one’s processual experience of negotiating the hermeneutic values in their different hearing-ases. The listener engages, then, in the process of molding and remolding, creating and negating, the two enigmatic categories. Through my analysis of two Cantopop songs and interviews with native Cantonese speakers, I suggest that Cantopop may invite an anamorphic listening, and that more broadly, it is an important, yet under-explored, genre with which to theorize about the relationships between music and language.
期刊介绍:
Music Theory Online is a journal of criticism, commentary, research and scholarship in music theory, music analysis, and related disciplines. The refereed open-access electronic journal of the Society for Music Theory, MTO has been in continuous publication since 1993. New issues are published four times per year and include articles, reviews, commentaries, and analytical essays. In addition, MTO publishes a list of job opportunities and abstracts of recently completed dissertations.