Tone – Melody Matching in Chaozhou Songs: A Corpus Analysis

Chaozhou is a tone language with eight tones and a wealth of tone sandhi, providing a complex context that can be expected to shape Chaozhou songs. This paper explores the degree to which tone and melody are matched in terms of pitch direction by using a corpus of Chaozhou songs. A high degree of tone-melody matching was found, with 89% in folk songs and 78% in contemporary songs. Findings also suggest that: 1) Chaozhou tone sandhi has an effect on the tone-melody matching; 2) the tones realised in context can be categorised into high-, mid-, and low-pitch groups by emphasising the tone-pitch extremes, rather than the ending pitch of tones found to be effective in previous studies of Cantonese songs; 3) in the case of melismas (multi-note realisations of a syllable), relationships between initial notes were found to have the most consistent influence on tone-melody matching.