Lexical Tone and Melodic Pitch in the Music of Teotitlan del Valle Zapotec
Goldberg, Kathryn
This study examines the relationship between lexical tone and melodic pitch in Teotitlim del Valle
Zapotec (TdVZ), an endangered tone language in the Otomanguean language family, presenting
an open corpus of three songs in the popular music style by native speaker and musician Gario
Angeles. This corpus includes the studio-recorded versions of these songs, solo vocal recordings,
full spoken versions of the songs, and recordings of all lexical items found in the lyrics in lexical
isolation. This study is especially valuable in that it develops a proposed methodology for studying
the relationship between lexical tone and musical pitch in an under documented language with a
complex tone system. The analysis presents a low correlation between melody and lexical tone,
suggesting that even if tone has the impulse to dictate melody, musical elements have such a
strong influence that they take precedence over lexical tone.
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