Music and Lyrics in Thai pop songs - Is tone-melody mismatch ...
Source: www.lipp.uni-muenchen.de
Topic: Pop Music
Sort Desciption: songs, tone-melody mismatch appears to be more tolerated in recent works of Thai pop. music. Saurman (1999) suggested that contemporary Thai pop songs, ...
Content Inside: Music and Lyrics in Thai pop songs - Is tone-melody mismatch really more tolerated nowadays than before? This talk aims to give a preliminary theoretic analysis of some mapping phenomena at the tone-melody interface in popular songs written in Cantonese and Thai, two of the world’s languages having the most complex tonal inventory. Data drawn from Mandarin pop songs will also be discussed briefly for contrastive purpose. In all the Cantonese songs collected and analyzed for this study, it is observed that tone and tune correspond closely in a particular manner, and the patterns of correlation are found to be extremely systematic. The case of Thai music is more controversial. While there is a high degree of correspondence demonstrated in traditional or classical Thai songs, tone-melody mismatch appears to be more tolerated in recent works of Thai pop music. Saurman (1999) suggested that contemporary Thai pop songs, especially those that are reinterpretation of western music, seem to abide tone-tune divergence. In Cantonese popular songs, however, tone-tune mismatches are extremely rare regardless of the presence of western elements in music. Strict matching between musical pitch transition and tonal target transition is observed in all the Cantonese pop songs in the sample. With data from 40 Thai songs composed in the past few years to present, this study attempts to argue against Saurman’s claim that ‘the degree of tone- tune correspondence in Thai songs decreases along the time-line’.
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