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 thetwo. This article investigates native Cantonese speakers speech-melody experience of listening toCantonese popular songs (henceforth Cantopop songs), a relatively uncharted territory inmusicological studies. It proposes a speech-melody complex that embraces native Cantonesespeakers 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, whichdepends on how much contextual information the listeners value in shaping and parsing out thecomplex. 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 thevisual arts, which calls into question the signification of the perceived object by perspectivaldistortion. When transferred to the sonic dimension, "anamorphic listening," I suggest, is not aboutat which point a sonic object becomes "distorted" but is about one s processual experience ofnegotiating the hermeneutic values in their different hearing-Ases. The listener engages, then, in theprocess of molding and remolding, creating and negating, the two enigmatic categories. Throughmy analysis of two Cantopop songs and interviews with native Cantonese speakers, I suggest thatCantopop may invite an anamorphic listening, and that more broadly, it is an important, yet under-explored, genre with which to theorize about the relationships between music and language.