Abstract:
Chinese folk songs differ from Western classical music in many aspects. The most fundamental structural difference is the way in which Chinese musical modes and scales are constructed. A Chinese pentatonic scale consists of five tones with four important elements: a Yun collection, a Gong note, a Diao Tou note (in some cases Gong and Diao Tou can be the same), and a Diao (interval order of the Yun). These concepts share some similarities with elements in Western music, such as pitch set, tonic, and mode. However, connecting these two element sets from different cultural backgrounds or borrowing terms from one to the other would create confusion. Furthermore, applying digital methods validated in one context to the other might generate uninterpretable results. These two traps are what I fall into during my study, and saw from other studies, too. In this presentation, I would like to present the progress of my work on a Chinese folk song corpus and the lesson I learned throughout the process: conducting music study needs to go back to music.