Cantonese has six tones, and a melody that moves against them turns your
words into different words. Type lyrics below to see the shape their tones
already demand, then drag any note and find out the moment the melody
starts fighting the language.
Drag a note to move it, or focus one and use ââ.
Hover a red or amber connector to see what the corpus says. Your draft saves
itself in this browser, and Copy link puts the whole thing in
a URL. There is no server and no account: nothing you write is ever uploaded.
Word finder
Not a dictionary. This is every word and phrase the corpus's lyricists
actually wrote, so everything here is already in register and already
singable. Click a note above to fill the slot, and the list narrows to
words whose tones the melody will actually accept.
What the corpus actually says
Where each tone sits, in semitones relative to a song's median pitch.
Two things fall out that the traditional 0243 ladder gets wrong: tone 5
sits with tone 3 rather than with tone 6, and tone 4 is a cliff, roughly
three semitones below everything else.
Median melodic interval between two tones, in semitones, with the number
of corpus examples. Bold cells are the 23 pairs where one direction
happens at least 80% of the time, which cantojam treats as hard rules.