Quantitative analysis of the relationship between linguistic tones and melody in jingju using music scores

Abstract

Comunicació presentada a: 4th International Digital Libraries for Musicology workshop (DLfM 2017), celebrat el 28 d'octubre de 2017 a Shanghai, Xina.

When lyrics of tonal languages are set to music, the pitch contour of the tones has to agree to a certain extent with the melodic contour to assure intelligibility. The relationship between the linguistic tones of the complex dialectal construct used in jingju (commonly known as Beijing or Peking opera) and its melody has been largely studied, but not definite consensus has been achieved among scholars. After reviewing the related literature, we present a first approach for the quantitative analysis of the relationship between linguistic tones and melody in jingju using a collection of machine readable music scores with tone category annotations for 7,283 syllables. We describe two statistical analyses performed in this collection regarding the melodic contour for each syllable and the pitch height relationship in 5,494 pairs of consecutive syllables. We argue that the obtained results contribute to supporting claims from the literature and complementing others, although some limitations of the approach might nuance the confidence of their validity.

This research is funded by the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Program, as part of the CompMusic project (ERC grant agreement 267583).