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

Abstract

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.