Duration, Pitch, and Loudness in Kunqu Opera Stage Speech

摘要

Objectives. Kunqu is a special type of opera within the Chinese tradition with 600 years of history. In it, stage speech is used for the spoken dialogue. It is performed in Ming Dynasty's mandarin language and is a much more dominant part of the play than singing. Stage speech deviates considerably from normal conversational speech with respect to duration, loudness and pitch. This paper compares these properties in stage speech conversational speech.