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SUMMARY:Singing in tone: text-setting constraints in tone languages - Dr J
 ames Kirby (University of Edinburgh)
DTSTART:20180503T153000Z
DTEND:20180503T173000Z
UID:TALK101455@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Giulia Bovolenta
DESCRIPTION:Speakers of European languages are generally puzzled by how it
  is possible to sing in tone languages like Thai or Chinese\, in which pit
 ch is an integral phonetic exponent of lexical meaning. If tone is crucial
  to imparting linguistic information\, how do writers and performers balan
 ce potentially competing artistic demands on melodic and lyrical content? 
 \n\nA growing body of research is beginning to make clear that this challe
 nge is an aspect of the more general problem of setting texts to music. Ju
 st as European scholarship on prosody has revealed formal constraints on p
 oetic language based on phonetic properties such as vowel length and stres
 s\, comparable text-setting constraints in tone languages exist that gover
 n the ways in which tonal sequences can be married to musical melodies.\n\
 nIn this talk\, I will present some of our recent work on tonal text-setti
 ng in several East and Southeast Asian languages. I will discuss the struc
 tural principles involved in tonal text-setting\; discovery procedures for
  how these principles might be inferred\; how language and genre impact to
 ne-melody coordination\; and how tonal text-setting interacts with aesthet
 ic considerations of performance. Time permitting\, I will also discuss ho
 w constraints on tone-melody correspondence might interact with metrics mo
 re generally.
LOCATION:GR-06/7\, Faculty of English\, 9 West Rd (Sidgwick Site)
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