Onomatopoeia and beyond: A study of the luogu jing of the Beijing Opera (China).

摘要

The term luogu jing, as used in this study, refers to a traditional notation device for percussion music of the Beijing Opera. Differing from most known national systems from other cultures, a distinctive feature of the luogu jing is that the note symbols of the luogu jing are not any graphic symbols that were particularly invented for recording the music but the regular conventional written characters of the Chinese language. It is commonly believed that the reason for having adopted these lexical graphs to transcribe the music is that the sounds of these characters resemble that of the instruments. However, the fact that the same instrument sound may have more than one character motes of different sounds and that each character may have a quite few homophonic counterparts in the language provoke questions about the validity of the common theory.; The results of perceptual experiments showed that the sounds of many character notes were connected closely with their instrument sounds and the following analyses suggest that the connections could be resulting from cross relations and/or correspondence of several prominent acoustic attributes (e.g. frequency, centroid, formants, duration, decay rate, and dynamics) of the two sets of sounds. However, the occurrence of acoustically disconnected characters prevented simply accounting for the adoption of these characters in mere physical terms. Theatrical and musical contexts of the instrument sounds, the communicative function of the speech sounds, and the historical background of the percussion music appeared to be significant factors contributing to the use of acoustically disconnected syllables. In deciding visual representations of the syllables, pragmatic factors such as an easiness in producing the character notes and familiarity of the characters appear to hold the prominent accountability, while the lexical semantics of the characters also demonstrated some significance.; It is concluded that the selection of luogu jing character notes have evident acoustic foundation; however, the significance of physical attributes may vary from case to case, and it is not always sufficient, even necessary, in adopting the logograms. The verbal sounds were not mere imitations of the percussion instrument sounds nor were the character notes randomly-picked visual representations from the language.