Where does tone collide?

In a tone language, pitch is used at the level of the word or syllable to distinguish one meaning from another, so that the same string of consonants and vowels said on a high, low, rising, or falling pitch counts as a different word. Yip's 2002 Tone surveyed how tone languages such as Mandarin, Cantonese, and many African and Asian languages organise these contrasts, how the tones combine and shift in connected speech, and how they are represented in phonology. The referent is a contrastive unit of a language's sound system, defined by its relation to the other tones of that same language, not a musical note, a muscle's tension, or the lightness of a painted area.[1]

Unit

A contrastive pitch level or contour on a syllable, set within one language's tone system

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Identified by minimal pairs and native-speaker elicitation, and traced acoustically as the fundamental frequency contour over the syllable

A tone is a sound with a definite, single pitch, and a pure tone is the simplest such sound, a sinusoidal pressure variation at one frequency; a musical tone is usually built from a fundamental and its harmonics, which together fix the pitch and give the sound its timbre. Rossing, Moore, and Wheeler's 2002 The Science of Sound set out how pure and complex tones are described by frequency, amplitude, and spectrum, and how those quantities relate to the perceived pitch and loudness. The referent is an acoustic event in the air, measured in hertz and decibels, and it is not a word-distinguishing pitch, a tension in a muscle, or a value in a picture.[2]

Unit

A sound of definite pitch, its frequency in hertz and its level in decibels

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Analysed with a microphone and spectrum analyser by frequency, amplitude, and harmonic content

Muscle tone, or tonus, is the tension a resting muscle holds and the resistance it offers to passive stretch, arising from the muscle's viscoelastic properties together with any low-level neural activation. Simons and Mense's 1998 Understanding and measurement of muscle tone separated the measurable sources of this tension, including viscoelastic tone, physiological contracture, and reflex or voluntary contraction, and argued that stiffness, the resistance to lengthening, is the most accurate measure of the whole. The referent is a mechanical state of living muscle, felt as resistance and quantified as stiffness, and it has nothing to do with a word-distinguishing pitch, a heard tone, or a tonal value beyond the shared word.[3]

Unit

A resting muscle's tension and resistance to stretch, quantified as stiffness

Recovery means

The muscle settles back to this resting tension once a voluntary or reflex contraction relaxes

Measured by

Judged clinically by passive movement, and quantified by stiffness, electromyography, or myotonometry

In visual art, tone, also called value, is the relative lightness or darkness of an area, independent of its hue: a tonal scale runs from the lightest to the darkest, and the arrangement of tones gives a picture its sense of light, form, and depth. Livingstone's 2002 Vision and Art explained how the eye's luminance channel responds to these light and dark differences, and how painters use tonal contrast, rather than colour alone, to model shape and space. The referent is a visual property of a surface or an image, seen as lighter or darker, and it is not a pitch that distinguishes words, a sound in the air, or a tension in a muscle.[4]

Unit

The relative lightness or darkness of an area, on a scale from light to dark

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Judged by eye against a value scale, and measured physically as luminance or reflectance