Knowledge Bank

Music and singing are cultural universals. Languages, conversely, display different phonological traits, such as tonality in the Sinitic languages. In research of how lexical tone interacts with musical melody, previous studies (Chan 1987, Lau 2010, Schellenberg 2013, Zhang and Cross 2021) have provided some contradictory findings in the analysis in Cantonese, Mandarin, and Teochew. To date, no such study has analyzed published Taiwanese music, although Chen (2015) analyzed Taiwanese singing and perception. Through the comparison of musical pitch contours with relative tone differences of four original songs performed by three Taiwanese artists, the present project asserts that there is correlation between lexical tone and musical melody for Taiwanese songs. Furthermore, the results suggest that the portrayal of Taiwanese identity by the artist plays an important role in determining the importance of tone melody correspondence. As such, the study has important ramifications for future analysis of Taiwanese music.