Jahrbuch des Phonogrammarchivs der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften 4 (English shop)

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Description

Relationships of speech tone and music have been intriguing me since my early studies in ethnomusicology and linguistics. Conducting fieldwork in Botswana in 1997 brought me in contact with a Bantu tone language of two tones, but in those days I had neither a matching methodology nor linguistic records that would have allowed me to focus on their relationship to singing and music – a recurring situation that is mentioned, among others, in Catherine Ingram’s contribution. The chance to participate in a DoBeS project in Upper Assam, India, documenting endangered Tai and Tibeto-Burman languages (isolating tone languages with contour tone) with project leader linguist Stephen Morey was a welcome challenge that taught me about the spectrum of possible relationships between speech tone and musics across different cultures. The “Workshop Relationships of Speech Tone and Music” in Vienna in 2012 developed out of the discourse between Stephen Morey and myself, and has become an important mile stone in what I see as an interdisciplinary basic research endeavour. Volumes dealing with this topic in a comparative way have previously been published, for example Thomas A. Sebeok & Donna Jean Umiker-Sebeok (1976) or Bonnie Wade (1993), but none of them targeted it as directly as the present one. The most valuable bibliography on the relation of speech tone and music is currently maintained online by Murray Schellenberg (2013); I had the pleasure of contributing a few items irregularly in the past.