Quick question....

How do you differentiate between language tones and music notes ?

Now my Thai skills are no where near good enough to be able to use this information.... i'm just curious

totster

Quick answer...

A song sung in Thai allows some latitude when it comes to the Thai tonal rules. So, musical notes follow the language tones TO A CERTAIN DEGREE.

on that note(no pun intended) i have written a song.

to the tune of "hey jude" :

mai mai

mai mai mai mai

mai mai mai mai mai mai mai mai mai

mai mai mai

mai mai mai mai mai mai mai

mai mai mai mai

mai mai mai mai mai

LOL...

True 'luuk thung' songs should follow the tone rules (and rhyming pattern rules), whereas modern Western-influenced Thai pop virtually throws the tonal system out the window, sometimes with very comical effects.

Language tones are not absolutes. They do not correspond to the keys on a piano.

One tone may change pitch during its cause; most notably in Thai, the falling and rising tones do (I would argue that the high tone glides slightly upward in pitch as well).

The low, mid and high tones are distinguished from each other, based on the speaker's own vocal range.

In other words, when a man is learning Thai from a tape and the Thai speaker on the tape is a woman, he should try to listen to and emulate the 'shape' of her tones, and the distance in pitch in relation to the other tones when she speaks, and not strain his voice to reach the same frequency as her voice.

(I made this mistake myself in the beginning since I started to learn the tones from a tape, without a teacher).

There are also some other features to languages tones, such as 'voice quality' - apart from its low, flat pitch, the low tone in Thai tends to have a 'creaky' quality when spoken clearly and in isolation.