Tune–Tone Relationships in Sung Duna Pikono

Abstract

This paper discusses the relationship between music and language with regards to pitch and tonal languages. In particular, it examines one performance of a sung narrative in the Papua New Guinea highlands, and the relationship between the musical realization and the linguistic text. This case study is placed in the context of previous literature examining the relationship between tonal language and song.

Keywords:

• Duna
• Ethnomusicology
• Herzog
• List
• Speech
• Sung Narrative
• Tonal Language
• Toneme
• Tune–Tone Correspondence

Notes

¹The terms ‘tune–tone correspondence’, ‘tune-melody’ and ‘tone-melody’ come from Leben (1985).

²Feld and Fox (1994) Nettl (1993) and Patel (2008) valuably mention such studies in general reviews of language and music, providing several examples.

³List calculated the tune–tone correspondence by comparing the preceding and following tones of the sung melody and the linguistic text.

⁴ Sprechstimme literally means ‘spoken-voice’, however, in music it is used interchangeably with the word sprechgesang which means ‘spoken-song’. Sprechstimme is a composition tool in Western art music where singers approximate notated pitches in a speaking voice.

⁵The Huli tonemes were derived by Murray Rule (1974).

⁶The genre seems to have been first described by Nicholas Modjeska (1977: 107, 332), and later analysed by Pamela Stewart and Andrew Strathern (Stewart & Strathern 2002: 41–44; Strathern & Stewart 2004: 49), Nicole Haley (2002: 132–137), Gillespie and San Roque (forthcoming), and Sollis (2007).

⁷Personal correspondence with Gillespie and San Roque, 2006.

⁸Personal correspondence with San Roque, 2006. San Roque's research has been assisted by the work of missionary/linguist Glenda Giles who produced a Duna translation of the New Testament in the mid-1970s.

⁹These lines were chosen in collaboration with San Roque. Phrases chosen represent a wide range of words and tone-melodies.

¹⁰Using the Pratt © software which can be obtained from http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/pratt.

¹¹The spoken toneme (2–2–2) for the word perene is, in this instance, interpreted as a rising word-tone that is affected by tone sandhi through a general declination across the phrase.

¹²The spoken toneme (3–3) for the word yara is, in this instance, interpreted as a rising word-tone that is affected by tone sandhi through a general declination across the phrase.

¹³This argument is developed in Sollis (2007), where Jakobson's notion of parallelism (1960) proves a useful device in explaining such interplay.