Cantopop and Speech-Melody Complex

Abstract

It is generally accepted that speech and melody are distinctive perceptual categories, and that one is able to overcome perceptual ambiguity to categorize acoustic stimuli as either of the two. This article investigates the speech-melody experience of listening to Cantonese popular songs (henceforth Cantopop songs), a relatively uncharted territory in musicological studies. It proposes a speech-melody complex that embraces native Cantonese speakers’ experience of the potentialities of speech and melody before they come into being. Speech-melody complex, I argue, does not stably contain the categories of speech or melody in their full-blown, asserted form, but concerns the ongoingness of the process of categorial molding, which depends on how much contextual information the listeners value in shaping and parsing out the complex. It follows, then, that making a categorial assertion implies a breakthrough of the complex. I then complicate speech-melody complex with the concept of “anamorphosis” borrowed from the visual arts, a concept that calls into question the signification of the perceived object by perspectival distortion. When reconfigured in the sonic dimension, “anamorphic listening,” I suggest, is less about at which point one listens to some “distorted” sonic object but more about one’s processual experience of negotiating the hermeneutic values in their different listening-ases. The listener engages, then, in the process of molding and remolding, creating and negating, the two enigmatic categories, creating new sonic objects along the way. Through my analysis of two Cantopop songs and interviews with native Cantonese speakers, I suggest that Cantopop may invite an anamorphic listening, and that more broadly, it serves as an important, yet thus far under-explored, genre to theorize about the relationships between music and language.