Comparing the Rhythm of Instrumental Music and Vocal Music in Mandarin and English

Abstract

This paper reports a study comparing the rhythm of instrumental music and vocal music in both the tonal language Mandarin Chinese and the non-tonal language British English. The widely accepted normalized pairwise variability index (nPVI) was adopted to measure the rhythm of language and music in these two cultures. Current findings validate that instrumental music in both cultures reflects the rhythmic characteristics of their corresponding languages. The rhythmic contrast of Chinese instrumental music is much lower than that of the British instrumental music. When language becomes part of the music, however, the rhythmic contrasts in Chinese vocal music is unexpectedly more variable than that in the British vocal music. Nevertheless, despite the high rhythmic contrasts in Chinese vocal music, the prominently lower rhythmic contrasts in Chinese children's songs compared to Chinese folk songs confirms the universality of the increased regularity in the rhythm of children’s songs, which demonstrates the impact of language habit on music rhythm.