published_or_final_version / Music / Master / Master of Philosophy

published_or_final_version / Literary and Cultural Studies / Master / Master of Arts

published_or_final_version / Music / Master / Master of Philosophy

Finally, this dissertation connects practitioners' autonomy in the production process to the independent production mode of local CCM. Although this production mode presents practical obstacles for local CCM practitioners, it has also allowed practitioners relative autonomy in their decision-making. This thus also bears implications for local CCM's contingent future including the possible scenario of mainstream co-optation. / For 30 years, the local CCM production community has been trying to find the right mix for the genre and push the music to a secular audience since CCM took shape in Hong Kong in the 1980s. CCM is more widely known as gospel music or contemporary hymnal songs in Hong Kong. This study examines the past and present shape of the local CCM scene to provide a historical perspective for interpreting its trajectory. This study sketches a brief history of local CCM in Hong Kong from the late 1960s to 2010 which helps to understand how local CCM has interacted with the commercial music scene including popular music trends and the pop industry environment throughout its development as well as church responses along the evolution of local CCM. / Practitioners' negotiations in CCM production are discussed on three dimensions: song text, performance and stardom. Each of these dimensions highlight common and unique opportunities and tensions in the mediation process, including commercialization, creativity, entertainment, hyperindividuality, evangelism, ministry efficacy and religious piety. Practitioners' negotiations between these interpenetrating and contesting elements shape CCM on the three dimensions. / This study investigates how the local CCM production community grapples with the complexities of fusing religion and media and negotiates the tensions and opportunities that arise between media conditions and assumptions and the religious sensibilities of CCM. By doing so it also engages in a current theoretical discussion about mediation and mediatization in the field of media and religion. This dissertation approaches CCM production as part of the process of mass mediation of religion, through which religious meanings are constantly constructed, negotiated, and reconstructed as practitioners negotiate the multiple conflicting, integrating and interpenetrating forces. In specific, this study addresses practitioners' negotiations between the media-based orientation frame, which include such factors as commercialization, industrial norms, cultural values in the media environment, and the religious orientation frame, which include a range of symbols, moral codes, doctrines, and resources that are religiously meaningful to individuals. / Ho, Wing Ki. / Adviser: Anthony Fung. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 73-01, Section: A, page: . / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2010. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 253-266). / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. [Ann Arbor, MI] : ProQuest Information and Learning, [201-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstract also in Chinese; appendix C-D in Chinese with some English.

published_or_final_version / Music / Master / Master of Philosophy

 In tone languages, tones, in addition to phonemes, are used to differentiate meanings. The tone of a word changes its meaning. This gives rise to a question regarding vocal music in such languages: does the melodic contour have to depend upon the lexical tones of the text so as to enhance the understanding of the text? This question has motivated a number of studies to examine the relationship between lexical tones and melody in different vocal genres of different tone languages. Yet a satisfactory answer is still missing. While existing studies reveal that the degree of conformity between speech tone and melody varies according to the genre as well as the language, some genres of Cantonese vocal music, such as Cantonese opera and Canto-pop, show a strikingly higher degree of tone-melody correspondence. Taking Canto-pop as the focus, the present study seeks to investigate the principles of tone-melody mapping—the underlying rules which govern the realization and perception of Cantonese speech tones in sung melody. It also seeks to gain a deeper understanding about how the constraints of speech tones affect the text-music interaction and why the preservation of speech tones is particularly prominent in this genre. Drawing insights from musicology, linguistics and psychology, the thesis presents an interdisciplinary research that casts new light on the subject of tone-melody relationship—the relationship between speech tones and sung melody in vocal music. It is found that the correspondence between musical intervals and tonal transitions in Cantonese speech can be crucial to tone perception in sung melody. But there are also occasions where the speech tones are still perceived correctly despite the occurrences of physical tone-melody mismatch, largely on account of the tonal, melodic, syntactic and semantic context. While a misperception of the speech tones may not always necessarily lead to a miscomprehension of the lyrics, it is still an aesthetic requirement for Cantopop to maintain perfect tone-melody mapping. This requirement even has an influence on the creative process of Cantopop. / published_or_final_version / Music / Master / Master of Philosophy

This PhD research aims at revealing the underlying complexity of the grammar of tone-melody mapping in Cantonese pop music. While linguists have shown a growing interest and invested painstaking effort in finding out whether lexical tones and musical melody interact in vocal music, the attention of these scholars mainly focuses on whether a lexical item remains intelligible to speakers of the given language when the tonal integrity is not preserved in the song. Others are interested in quantifying the degree of tone-melody correspondence and in carrying out cross-linguistic comparisons. The majority of such research studies fail to unravel the details of how tone and melody interact. This research challenges the methodologies and assumptions made in some previous studies that fail to account for the discrepancy between structural and perceptual ‘correspondence’ or ‘mismatch’. The notions of ‘correspondence’ and ‘mismatch’ are revisited and redefined from a perceptual perspective – a ‘perfect match’ refers to the mapping between a melodic transition and a tonal target transition that is satisfactorily accepted by native speakers of the language, whereas a ‘mismatch’ refers to a tone-melody pairing that sounds awkward to the native ear, whether or not the string of syllables are comprehensible, ambiguous or unintelligible when set to the song. Through conducting perception tests, songs are grouped into two main categories for two different purposes – the songs without perceptual mismatch are used for a profound analysis of the well-formed mapping patterns at the abstract level. The most frequently attested correspondence pattern concerns the pairing between tonal target transition and melodic transition progressing in the same direction. The directionality constraint is satisfied in about 80% of the cases. It is also revealed that level tonal target sequences can be mapped to non-level melodies and still remain well-formed. This mapping, however, is strictly conditional and only occurs when licensed. The other group of songs are those in which native speakers have identified cases of perceptual mismatch. By examining the ill-formed examples, other mapping constraints are uncovered – the interval constraint requires that the pitch distance of a melodic transition be comparable to that of the corresponding tonal target transition. The mapping criterion is therefore more like a ‘vector’, obliging the two transitions to agree not only in direction but also in slope. The Hidden Structure Alignment constraint is the third important mapping constraint discovered that succeeds in providing solutions to account for unusual pairings or mismatches that directionality and interval fail to explain. In order that a tonal target transition match a melodic transition, the hidden or phonetically unexpressed semitones on both tonal and melodic scales should be aligned to or absent from the same edge. This constraint is helpful to account for the extremely restricted mapping patterns at the song-final cadence. By investigating a large corpus of Cantonese pop songs written by various lyricists, this research proposes a detailed description of the grammar of Cantonese tone-melody mapping in terms of the interaction of the directionality, interval and hidden structure alignment constraints. / published_or_final_version / Linguistics / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

published_or_final_version / Music / Master / Master of Philosophy

published_or_final_version / Music / Master / Master of Philosophy

published_or_final_version / abstract / Music / Master / Master of Philosophy