Singing in a Tone Language: Shona

Abstract

To what extent does speech melody influence the composition of song melody in tone languages? This is a question that has been raised periodically in both linguistics and musicology over the past century but has never been satisfactorily answered. This paper is a preliminary examination of vocal music from Shona that provides further evidence towards the solution of this puzzle through acoustic analysis of sung and spoken melodies of three songs in Shona, a Bantu language spoken in Zimbabwe. This examination shows that, in the songs examined, there is a statistically significant correspondence between the spoken melody and the sung melody but that the locus of parallelism is not predictable. 1. Background A culture may be presumed to have three basic choices when it comes to representing speech tones in music: linguistic tone can be slavishly followed; it can be abandoned completely; or a position somewhere in the middle can be taken. Research on the relationship between speech melody and sung melody has been carried out in a

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