An Acoustic Study of Pitch Rules of Chinese Poetry

한시의 평측법에 대한 음향음성학적 연구

The purpose of this study is to investigate the pitch rules of Chinese poetry. Pitch rules are concerned with the high tone and the low tone. Because Chinese poetry is a fixed form of verse, it must keep pitch rules to compose Chinese poetry. But until now there has been no acoustic study of pitch rules of Chinese poetry. So, for the first time the present study investigates pitch rules of Chinese poetry acoustically. Pitch contours were analyzed from the sound spectrogram made by Praat. Results showed that actual pitch patterns did not coincide with theoretical pitch rules in reciting Chinese poetry. Therefore, in studying Chinese classics, the Chinese poetry, which has traditionally been considered to be recited according to original Chinese pitch rules, must now be considered in terms of how pitch rules may have changed over time in Korea since it was first introduce to Korean scholars.