Abstract:
This dissertation studied the relationship between tones and musical notes in Thai pop songs in 2 aspects: 1) compatibility between tones and musical notes and 2) relationship between tonal transitions and musical note transitions. The data used in this research contained 100 songs from THE GUITAR YEAR BOOK from 2013-2014 and the data was randomised by using stratified sampling method according to musical keys and genders of the singers. They were written down on to the five-line staff according to the actual musical notes. Then the data was converted to Microsoft Excel for statistical analysis. The orders of musical notes within the range of each song were used to analyse the compatibility between tones and musical notes. However, the result for compatibility disproved the hypothesis stating that the group of lexical tones with lower pitch such as LOW and FALLING corresponded with low musical notes in the order and group of lexical tones with higher pitch such as HIGH and RISING corresponded with high musical notes in the order. However, the result of compatibility for linker syllables supported the hypothesis stating that there is no compatibility between linker syllables and the orders of musical notes within the range of each song. The researcher also examined the relationship between tonal transitions and musical note transitions. The data contained 13,495 transitions and the result revealed that in Thai pop songs, there were 7,779 parallel transitions and this was more often than opposing and non-opposing transitions at a statistically significant level (p<0.001). Lexical stress, note duration, tempo and the position of the syllable in musical phrase affected the relationship. The result showed that stress affected the relationship and grammatical words will yield more opposing transitions significantly (p<0.001). For note duration, the longer ones correlated with higher percentage of parallel transitions, while the shorter ones reliably matched opposing transitions (p<0.001). Moreover, tempo also reliably affected the relationship between tonal transitions and musical note transitions (p=0.00559). For position of the syllable in musical phrase, the syllables occurred at the end of phrase correlated with parallel transitions at a statistically significant level (p<0.001). In conclusion, mapping between lexical tones and musical notes depended on the relationship between tonal transitions and musical note transitions not compatibility between tones and musical notes.