Sonic Design: The Nature of Sound and Music. When a person speaks a sentence involving multiple e sounds, the peaks will shift within these ranges, and the movement of the peaks between two instances establishes the difference in their values on the pitch contour. Nevertheless, by establishing a fixed reference point in the frequency function of a complex sound, and then observing the movement of this reference point as the function translates, one can generate a meaningful pitch contour consistent with human experience.įor example, the vowel e has two primary formants, one peaking between 400 and 600 Hz and one between 22 Hz. Pure tones have a clear pitch, but complex sounds such as speech and music typically have intense peaks at many different frequencies. The same contour can be transposed without losing its essential relative qualities, such as sudden changes in pitch or a pitch that rises or falls over time. In music, the pitch contour focuses on the relative change in pitch over time of a primary sequence of played notes. Unnatural pitch contours result in synthesis that sounds 'lifeless' or 'emotionless' to human listeners, a feature that has become a stereotype of speech synthesis in popular culture. One of the primary challenges in speech synthesis technology, particularly for Western languages, is to create a natural-sounding pitch contour for the utterance as a whole. It also indicates intonation in pitch accent languages. It is fundamental to the linguistic concept of tone, where the pitch or change in pitch of a speech unit over time affects the semantic meaning of a sound. Pitch contour may include multiple sounds utilizing many pitches, and can relate to frequency function at one point in time to the frequency function at a later point. In linguistics, speech synthesis, and music, the pitch contour of a sound is a function or curve that tracks the perceived pitch of the sound over time. Lua error in a at line 80: module 'strict' not found. Compare Gwoyeu Romatzyh with Hanyu Pinyin (in parentheses): bai (bāi), bair (bái), bae (bǎi), bay (bài).Lua error in a at line 80: module 'strict' not found. Different spelling for the same vowel with different tones in systems like Latinxua Sin Wenz, Gwoyeu Romatzyh, Modern Literal Taiwanese etc.(The doubling of the numeral in ⟨33⟩ in the Asian example is used to disambiguate a mid level tone from a 'tone 3' (3rd tone), which in general is not at pitch level 3.) Numerical substitutions for tone letters.Tone letters such as mid level ⟨ ˧⟩, high falling ⟨ ˥˩⟩, low falling ⟨ ˨˩⟩, mid rising ⟨ ˧˥⟩, low rising ⟨ ˩˧⟩, dipping ⟨ ˨˩˦⟩, and peaking ⟨ ˧˦˩⟩.(These are also used for high, mid, and low level contour tones.) Or the simpler register tones, where diacritics such as high ⟨á⟩, mid ⟨ā⟩, and low ⟨à⟩ are usually sufficient for transcription. Diacritics such as falling ⟨ â⟩, rising ⟨ ǎ⟩, dipping ⟨ a᷉⟩, peaking ⟨ a᷈⟩, high falling ⟨ a᷇⟩, low falling ⟨ a᷆⟩, high rising ⟨ a᷄⟩ and low rising ⟨ a᷅⟩.The report did not determine if the final fall was lexical or merely the declination typically seen at the ends of prosodic units, so these may actually be dipping tones. The Old Xiang dialect of Qiyang is reported to have two 'double contour' lexical tones, high and low fall–rise–fall, or perhaps high falling – low falling and low falling – high falling: ˦˨˧˨ and ˨˩˦˨ (42). Lexical tones more complex than dipping (falling–rising) or peaking (rising–falling) are quite rare, perhaps nonexistent, though prosody may produce such effects. However, in Dinka it is reported that the phonemic falling tone falls late (impressionistically high level + fall, ) while the falling allophone of the low tone starts early (impressionistically fall + low level, ). That is, in some accents or languages a falling tone might fall at the end and in others it might fall at the beginning, but that such differences would not be distinctive. It has been theorized that the relative timing of a contour tone is not distinctive. Tones which are too short to exhibit much of a contour, typically because of a final plosive consonant, may be called checked, abrupt, clipped, or stopped tones. A tone in a contour-tone language which remains at approximately an even pitch is called a level tone. When the pitch descends, the contour is called a falling tone when it ascends, a rising tone when it descends and then returns, a dipping or falling-rising tone and when it ascends and then returns, it is called a peaking or rising-falling tone. Chart (which is said to be invented by a Chinese linguist Yuen Ren Chao) illustrating the contours four tones in Standard Chinese

Pitch contour meaning