A palavra cantada em comunidades-terreiro de origem Iorubá no Brasil: da melodia ao sistema tonal / The word sung in Yoruba origin communities in Brazil: of melody to the tonal system

AUTOR(ES)

Sidnei Barreto Nogueira

DATA DE PUBLICAÇÃO

2009

RESUMO

This work aims at analyzing the melody-tone relationship in African origin chants in Queto houses of candomble. The stable character of the sung word has led to the analysis of musical texts. In order to implement investigations ten Nago chants have been selected. They have been recorded without instruments by the people of Saint themselves and an Yoruba chant was recorded by a native Yoruba speaker from Abeokuta. Chants have been organized in tessitures (simplified partitures) divided in verses aiming at the simultaneous visualization of the singing and lyrics; one has made, for each chant verse, with the use of the WinPitchPro program, a sonogram with the pitch wave, spectrogram and Fo measures. By comparing the chant and Yoruba speech one has initially observed three possibilities between melody pitch and phonological tone: (i) to ignore phonological tones and the meaning of words and use pitch variations to exclusively designate the melody, which would preserve musicality but would reduce the lyrical intelligibility; (ii) to preserve the regular pitch variations related to lexical tones ignoring musicality and sacrificing musicality in order to achieve intelligibility; (iii) to try to keep, even partially, the contrasts of lexical pitches without excessively restricting Fo melodical rules. In order to develop this work one has mainly followed the third hypothesis. In the analysis of both the Yoruba speech and chants and in the confrontation of Yoruba/Nago, it has been possible to identify the stableness of supra-segments of the African language. The achievement of tones by the use of melody pitches has presented the reproduction of universal phenomena such as downdrift, downstep and reciprocal processes of assimilation and spread. The analyses show the partial maintenance of the lexical tones in the sacred Nago word confirming the stable character of a word conditioned by linguistic and extra linguistic elements.

ASSUNTO(S)

iorubá/ nagô music melody pitch línguas africanas no brasil música tom fonológico yoruba/nago african languages in brazil phonological tone palavra cantada sung word pitch melódico

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