Welcome to the project website of the Cantopop corpus!
This website offers key information about the 105-song Cantopop corpus, first created for a corpus study examining tone-melody correspondence in the genre. Cantonese is a tone language, meaning that differences in pitch can contribute to different word meanings. In songs written in a tone language, song melody and linguistic tones should ideally correlate with each other, in order to maintain intelligibility of the lyrics. This study contributes to the study of Cantopop and tone-melody correspondence by offering a large and representative corpus of the genre and providing new insights about observations that have been previously overlooked.
For more information about the study and the construction of the corpus, see Lee (2023).
Past presentations related to the project:
- “Cantonese tones and text-setting in Cantopop” (University of Toronto, 1 Feb 2025)
- “Tone-Melody Correspondence and Melodic Regression in Cantonese Popular Music: Evidence from a Corpus Study” (First International Digital Musicology Conference, Warsaw, Poland, 25 Oct 2024; Digital Technologies Applied to Music Research Conference, Lisbon, Portugal, 27 Jun 2024)
- “Tones and Tunes: Text-Setting in Cantonese Music” (Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden, Vancouver, 8 Jul 2023)