Duration, Pitch, and Loudness in Kunqu Opera Stage Speech

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.

A famous, highly experienced female singer's performed stage speech and reading of the same lyrics in a conversational speech mode. Clear differences are found.

As compared with conversational speech, stage speech had longer word and sentence duration and word duration was less variable. Average sound level was 16 dB higher. Also mean fundamental frequency was considerably higher and more varied. Within sentences, both loudness and fundamental frequency tended to vary according to a low-high-low pattern.

Some of the findings fail to support current opinions regarding the characteristics of stage speech, and in this sense the study demonstrates the relevance of objective measurements in descriptions of vocal styles.