Despite the close resemblance of language and music in terms of their acoustic nature, the relationship between lexical tone and melody in Thai music has received little attention. This study aims to address the issue whether Thai popular songs demonstrate close correspondence between linguistic tone and musical melody. A comparative approach will be adopted based on the findings of a previous study on the tone-tune interface in Cantonese popular songs (Ho 2006).

The Thai language possesses a rich tonal inventory which consists of five contrastive tones – high, mid, low, falling and rising. One may wonder if the lexical tones and the melody of a song need to match in order that the comprehensibility of the lyrics to be preserved. According to Ho (1998), an almost perfect tone-melody mapping was found in a traditional Thai song composed in the 60s. Not only global pitch movement of word phrases or stanzas but also localized tone contour of individual syllables is fully represented by the melody. Nonetheless, tone-melody mismatch appears to be more tolerated in recent works of Thai pop music. Saurman (1999) suggested that the degree of correspondence is related to the genres of music and the year of production – a higher degree of tone-melody correspondence is found in classical and traditional songs, whereas contemporary pop songs especially those that are reinterpretation of western music seem to abide tone-tune divergence. In Cantonese popular songs, however, tone-tune mismatches are extremely rare regardless of their origin or the year of composition. Strict matching between musical pitch transition and tonal target transition is observed in all the Cantonese pop songs analyzed. With data from 20 Thai songs composed in the past few decades to present, this study attempts to reveal and account for the structural differences, if any, between the tone-tune correspondence of Thai songs and that of Cantopop.

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