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Teaching traditional art forms in schools and the community has proven an effective way of ensuring the transmission of traditional culture. But due to the lack of valid and normative assessment guidance, the assessments of Cantonese operatic singing are still developing, impairing the instructiveness in its teaching and learning and restraining the education and development of this traditional genre within contemporary society. Accordingly, to guide the design of a holistic assessment, the revised Bloom's taxonomy was adopted to form a theoretical framework from which a criterion- and standard-based assessment framework with four domains has been proposed. Four teachers and 24 students of Cantonese opera institutions in Guangdong, China, were invited to pilot the assessment framework. Afterwards, semi-structured interviews were conducted from which two research questions were answered satisfactorily: 1) proposing a criteria- and standard-based assessment framework is necessary, for the traditional assessment practice is weak in guiding teaching and learning and 2) positive feedback supported the proposed assessment framework facilitates the teaching and learning of Cantonese operatic singing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A revised abstract is as follows: Cantonese operatic singing is widespread in Hong Kong with numerous amateurs learning in community club settings. However, limited research has been taken on how amateurs learn in the community. This article reports on an autoethnographic study of a community music club catering to Cantonese operatic singing in Hong Kong. The author joined the club for six years as a full member and attended weekly gatherings to identify the features characterising informal learning with participant observations and informal conversations as research methods. Trustworthiness of the study was built on developed rapport with three members and lengthy period of data collection. Influenced by Chinese traditional culture and beliefs, a proactive learning attitude with industry, a competency of self-learning, and the development of positive inter-personal relationships were keys to earning the respect of senior members for access of learning. This study implies a need to balance between informal learning and a systematic pedagogy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For decades, the transmission of Cantonese opera in Hong Kong and China has faced considerable challenges, including a lack of valid assessment. This study aims to propose a holistic theoretical framework for the assessment of Cantonese operatic singing after 1) analysing two graded examinations of Peking opera and Cantonese opera and 2) interviewing ten Cantonese opera experts and their students from Guangdong and Hong Kong. Findings reveal that the designs of the existing graded examinations in xiqu are still developing; multiple problems exist in the daily assessment practices including: 1) dependence on subjective perception, 2) a focus on the assessment of performance skills and a lack of multidimensionality, and 3) an inclination to momentary judgment and a lack of sustainability in assessing and documenting students' progress. Suggestions include introducing criterion- and standard-based assessments and increasing cooperation between artists and education experts, which may further promote the inheritance, popularity, and development of this traditional art form. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses cultural performances, mainly Cantonese opera, in a Canadian context from an intercultural studies perspective. Topics include drawing on cultural activities primarily organized by and for Chinese Canadian communities; and dynamics of Chinese Canadians bridging their cultural identities between their hometowns and Canada in the cases of immigrants, between generations among Chinese Canadians, and between cultural subgroups of Chinese diasporas.

Wong Fei-hung was a Cantonese martial arts master from southern China who became associated with a melody called ‘General’s Ode’. Since the 1950s, over 100 Hong Kong movies and television shows have forged the link by using this melody as Master Wong’s theme. During fieldwork in a Chinese Canadian kung fu club, I observed several consultants claiming this piece as a Cantonese national anthem—a hymn for a nation without a sovereign state. Virtual ethnography conducted online showed that this opinion is held more widely, but that the piece also inspires broader Chinese nationalist sentiment. My analysis of speech-tone relationships to melodic contour in Cantonese and Mandarin versions of the song, however, has revealed a tight integration with the former that the latter lacked. By sharpening Anderson’s concept of unisonance, I explore how this song has become an unofficial transnational anthem for Cantonese people, arguing that Master Wong’s theme auralises an abstract sense of imagined community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the relationship between traditional leisure activities and public space by studying Cantonese opera in the urban parks of Guangzhou, China. The approach utilises place construction theory to analyse the public space construction processes of Cantonese opera. This study found that Cantonese opera, as leisure embedded in the urban parks, constructs the park as a site of performativity and joyful togetherness. The local government constructs the urban park as a locale to celebrate traditional culture and market the city to its residents and visitors alike. Cantonese opera participants frequent the park and find it suitable for coordinating simple leisure activities and professional performances. This may be due to the perceived benefits of self-entertainment, health promotion and culture promotion. These factors, in turn, demonstrate the performativity of urban parks. As for joyful togetherness, elderly participants seek a sense of belonging and personal safety in urban parks by means of traditional leisure activities and social relationships, which help to ease the psychological impact of rapid urbanisation. During the place construction process, leisure participants gain an awareness of culture and space as part of this social ritual. Therefore, the influence of these operas extends to the local city and governmental spheres. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the United States, Chinese theatres were prosperous in the 1920s, creating a vibrant Cantonese opera culture in several major cities. They staged performances daily, featuring stellar singers and elaborate productions. As cultural migration, operas played significant roles in Chinese communities, from entertainment to ritual worship, and from public face to daily practices. This article argues that the cultural space constituted an important part of Chinese American collective memory. The theatre space was complicatedly shaped by a list of players including the trans-Pacific network of merchants and performers, legal brokers, US Immigration officers at the port and in Washington, DC, as well as enthusiastic audiences and the social milieu. The theatres were subjected to many constraints and limited by them. By studying this cultural memory in its complicated layers, the article also explores the ways in which Chinese theatres and opera performances provide an important imaginary space for second-generation Chinese Americans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cantonese opera is a regional Chinese operatic genre, which because of its flexible and adaptive nature can be performed in diverse venues. Street performances of Cantonese opera occur in parks, community plazas, open-air car parks, and indoor shopping malls, with audiences usually composed of people from the immediate neighborhood. These performances are smaller in scale than Cantonese opera being performed in theaters and are termed 街檔 (Jie Dang), or “street booth,” reflecting the circumstances of their staging. Like many other types of street music, Jie Dang has a long history in Hong Kong, where Cantonese is a dominant social dialect. In the last ten years, Jie Dang has secured a position on the list of District Free Entertainment Programmes provided by the Leisure and Cultural Services Department of the Government of the Hong Kong Special Administration Region. Observations of live performances, interviews with artists and professionals in Cantonese opera, and government reports document the phenomenon of Jie Dang from four perspectives: sociological context; performance practice; geographical context; and logistics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Abstract: For nontonal language speakers, speech processing is lateralized to the left hemisphere and musical processing is lateralized to the right hemisphere (i.e., function-dependent brain asymmetry). On the other hand, acoustic temporal processing is lateralized to the left hemisphere and spectral/pitch processing is lateralized to the right hemisphere (i.e., acoustic-dependent brain asymmetry). In this study, we examine whether the hemispheric lateralization of lexical pitch and acoustic pitch processing in tonal language speakers is consistent with the patterns of function- and acoustic-dependent brain asymmetry in nontonal language speakers. Pitch contrast in both speech stimuli (syllable /ji/ in Experiment 1) and nonspeech stimuli (harmonic tone in Experiment 1; pure tone in Experiment 2) was presented to native Cantonese speakers in passive oddball paradigms. We found that the mismatch negativity (MMN) elicited by lexical pitch contrast was lateralized to the left hemisphere, which is consistent with the pattern of function-dependent brain asymmetry (i.e., left hemisphere lateralization for speech processing) in nontonal language speakers. However, the MMN elicited by acoustic pitch contrast was also left hemisphere lateralized (harmonic tone in Experiment 1) or showed a tendency for left hemisphere lateralization (pure tone in Experiment 2), which is inconsistent with the pattern of acoustic-dependent brain asymmetry (i.e., right hemisphere lateralization for acoustic pitch processing) in nontonal language speakers. The consistent pattern of function-dependent brain asymmetry and the inconsistent pattern of acoustic-dependent brain asymmetry between tonal and nontonal language speakers can be explained by the hypothesis that the acoustic-dependent brain asymmetry is the consequence of a carryover effect from function-dependent brain asymmetry. Potential evolutionary implication of this hypothesis is discussed. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Ever since its sovereignty reverted to China, Hong Kong has been torn between its national (in terms of China and its ‘soft’ power) and global status (as ‘Asia's World City’). In this special context, Hong Kong's singular, ambiguous but prolific existence ceased. This paper endeavours to map ‘Cantopop’ (Chinese popular songs) on the new media landscape and examine its decline in the context of the rise and fall of cover versions. Cantopop was once very popular, not only in Hong Kong but also in its neighbouring regions. Its rise in the 1970s was a result of its typical hybridity, an important aspect of which was influenced by the use of cover versions that changed its soundscape. In the mid-1990s, the Cantopop market started to shrink significantly. A radio campaign for localisation advocated the release of original songs aimed at enhancing the development of Cantopop, but in the end proved to have the opposite effect. In the new millennium, ‘Mandapop’ (Mandarin popular songs) has taken on the role as the trend setter of the Chinese popular music industry. We argue in this paper that Cantopop's decline is the result of Hong Kong's loss of hybridity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In tone languages there are potential conflicts in the perception of lexical tone and intonation, as both depend mainly on the differences in fundamental frequency (F0) patterns. The present study investigated the acoustic cues associated with the perception of sentences as questions or statements in Cantonese, as a function of the lexical tone in sentence final position. Cantonese listeners performed intonation identification tasks involving complete sentences, isolated final syllables, and sentences without the final syllable (carriers). Sensitivity (d′ scores) were similar for complete sentences and final syllables but were significantly lower for carriers. Sensitivity was also affected by tone identity. These findings show that the perception of questions and statements relies primarily on the F0 characteristics of the final syllables (local F0 cues). A measure of response bias (c) provided evidence for a general bias toward the perception of statements. Logistic regression analyses showed that utterances were accurately classified as questions or statements by using average F0 and F0 interval. Average F0 of carriers (global F0 cue) was also found to be a reliable secondary cue. These findings suggest that the use of F0 cues for the perception of intonation question in tonal languages is likely to be language-specific. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the concept of transcribing the translations of Cantonese pop songs. According to the author, he does not understand a Cantonese song but with a slightly relaxed attention of listening to it, there would sound English words over the unfamiliar syllables. The author comes with an idea to develop his discovery into formal, contemplative technique of composition. For several weeks, every night, the author transcribed translations of the Cantonese pop songs, and he had 200 pieces which include the long, narrow columns in tiny, illegible print, from which the 49 pieces in ráydee ō were chosen and revised.

Abstract: English vowels had been proposed in previous studies to be used as a simple tool for the brain mapping of language. A proper fMRI study of Cantonese rhymes, each of which being a required and fundamental unit of a Cantonese syllable, remains to be carried out. Using an auditory task with Cantonese rhymes which carry no semantic meaning, we observed a minimal amount of positive BOLD signal at the caudate nucleus when Cantonese rhymes were contrasted with their corresponding filtered sounds. Typical language activating regions of the prefrontal cortex, the medial prefrontal cortex and the lateral temporal cortex on both left and right sides were not activated by Cantonese rhymes. Based on the absence of brain activation at the typical language areas in the contrast of Cantonese rhymes relative to filtered sounds, the auditory task with Cantonese rhymes may not be a robust tool for the individual clinical assessment of hemispheric dominance for language. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This study investigated the contributions of temporal periodicity cues and the effectiveness of enhancing these cues for Cantonese tone recognition in noise. A multichannel noise-excited vocoder was used to simulate speech processing in cochlear implants. Ten normal-hearing listeners were tested. Temporal envelope and periodicity cues (TEPCs) below 500 Hz were extracted from four frequency bands: 60–500, 500–1000, 1000–2000, and 2000–4000 Hz. The test stimuli were obtained by combining TEPC-modulated noise signals from individual bands. For periodicity enhancement, temporal fluctuations in the range 20–500 Hz were replaced by a sinusoid with frequency equal to the fundamental frequency of original speech. Tone identification experiments were carried out using disyllabic word carriers. Results showed that TEPCs from the two high-frequency bands were more important for tone identification than TEPCs from the low-frequency bands. The use of periodicity-enhanced TEPCs led to consistent improvement of tone identification accuracy. The improvement was more significant at low signal-to-noise ratios, and more noticeable for female than for male voices. Analysis of error distributions showed that the enhancement method reduced tone identification errors and did not show any negative effect on the recognition of segmental structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract??From lyrics-display on electronic music players and Karaoke videos to surtitles for live Chinese opera performance, one feature is common to all these everyday functionalities temporal: synchronization of the written text and its corresponding musical phrase. Our goal is to automate the process of lyrics alignment, a procedure which, to date, is still handled manually in the Cantonese popular song (Cantopop) industry. In our system, a vocal signal enhancement algorithm is developed to extract vocal signals from a CD recording in order to detect the onsets of the syllables sung and to determine the corresponding pitches. The proposed system is specifically designed for Cantonese, in which the contour of the musical melody and the tonal contour of the lyrics must match perfectly. With this prerequisite, we use a dynamic time warping algorithm to align the lyrics. The robustness of this approach is supported by experiment results. The system was evaluated with 70 twenty-second music segments and most samples have their lyrics aligned correctly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the emergence and development of Chinese traditional music in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Circumstances that contributed to the rise of Cantonese music in Vancouver; Establishment of the University of British Columbia Chinese Ensemble; Development of the British Columbia Chinese Orchestra; Formation of the British Columbia Music Ensemble.

Examines how young children sing Cantonese songs with different pitch relationships between text and melody. Texts of diatonic songs; Differences in overall pitch accuracy; Exhibitions of linguistic tonal articulation.