Towards a Cross-Cultural Theory of Tone-Tune Mapping: A Comparative Study of Cantonese and Yorùbá

Keywords: Cantonese; Yorùbá; tone-tune mapping; comparative analysis

Abstract: While recent research has investigated tone-tune mapping in diverse regions in Asia, Africa, and Meso-America, a cross-cultural understanding of tone-tune mapping remains limited due to such variables as the role of tone in language comprehension, sample size, and musical genre. This article aims to lay a collaborative groundwork for a cross-cultural theory of tone-tune mapping by comparing two well-studied tone languages: Cantonese and Yorùbá. Examining the text-setting practices in the two languages with a constraint-based approach, this article explores seven aspects of tone-tune mapping in Cantonese and Yorùbá, namely, tonology, genre, interval size, pitch reset at text phrase/prosodic boundaries, oblique settings and declination, contour tones, and tone-tune independence. Original music analyses are conducted to explore the musical-linguistic constraints in the intersection of these features in relation to lyric intelligibility and listener perception. The article concludes that while cross-cultural tone-tune mapping models may not fully capture the complexities across music-linguistic cultures, global preference rules do emerge from localized constraints.