Shi Yi on song: “prolonging the words” and “a string of pearls”

The passage closes Shi Yi’s answer to Zigong about which songs suit which temperaments. The first half describes good singing; the second traces song from speech to “drawn-out speech”, sighing and dance, an overflow of feeling beyond words. (队 is read as 坠, “to fall”.)

Read beside the earlier chapters, at least two points shed light in both directions. First, “speech drawn out” defines singing as the prolongation of speech. In the language of Chapters 2 and 3, what is prolonged is chiefly the vowel: while a vowel is sustained, the relation between source and tract changes from the rapid transitions of speech into a steady state that can be “tuned”; clustering formants and placing harmonics in favourable regions of reactance only make sense over such a stretch of time. Second, “a stop as still as a withered tree” and “note follows note, like a string of pearls” describe a pitch line with two qualities at once: each note held steady (where the loop of Chapter 5 must suppress drift without oscillating), and notes that are joined yet distinct. Singing teachers today might speak of “clear pitches within a legato line”.

They are not the same thing, however. Shi Yi is speaking of how song sounds, of aesthetic standards and of the relation between song and feeling; “rising like lifting, falling like dropping” are metaphors, not descriptions of laryngeal movement.

The Zhuangzi: the piping of man, of earth and of heaven

The original meaning of this passage is philosophical. “I lost myself” (吾丧我), forgetting the clinging “I” that takes itself to be in charge, is the starting point of the whole chapter; the piping of man, of earth and of heaven leads step by step to “who is it that rouses them?”: the sounds of all things are so of themselves, with no instigator standing behind them. It is part of the chapter’s argument for dissolving the opposition of right and wrong, and of self and things. (Some editions read 自已 for 自己 in “lets each be itself”.)

One formal resemblance is worth noting, provided the boundary is held. The piping of earth, one wind sounding differently through hollows of different shapes, resembles the source–filter picture of Chapter 2; “lets each be itself” recalls Chapter 1, where each opening of the folds is not “roused” by the muscles but sustained by airflow and tissue themselves. But Zhuangzi is not discussing acoustics, and reading the “piping of heaven” as physics would misunderstand both. For singers there may be another meaning: Volume 10’s research on external focus and Chapter 5’s “feedforward does most of the work” both suggest that skilled phonation needs no “I” issuing orders at every moment. That is the author’s extension, not what the Zhuangzi says.

The Treatise on Singing and Transmitting the Sound of Yuefu: books on singing

Yannan Zhi’an’s Treatise on Singing (唱论) from the Yuan dynasty is among the earliest surviving works devoted to the art of singing, and Xu Dachun’s Transmitting the Sound of Yuefu (乐府传声) from the Qing is a well-known treatise on singing in the Kunqu and northern traditions; both are included in the Collection of Classical Chinese Writings on Drama (中国戏曲研究院 编 1959).

The Treatise on Singing discusses, in short entries, the vocal lines, rhythm and types of tunes of sung verse and the faults commonly heard, summing up the experience of singing northern-style sung verse in the Yuan. Transmitting the Sound of Yuefu is more systematic, divided into several dozen short sections such as “Mouth Rules for Producing the Sound” (出声口诀), “The Five Sounds” (五音), “The Four Mouth Shapes” (四呼), “Returning to the Rhyme” (归韵) and “Closing the Sound” (收声). Its core is the word: the initial of each syllable is classified by place of articulation into five “sounds”, throat, tongue, teeth, molars and lips; the final is classified by mouth shape into four “calls”, open, even, closed and rounded; and in singing a syllable the “emission” (the head of the word), the “return to the rhyme” (its belly) and the “closing” (its tail) must all be rendered clearly, so that when the word is correct the vocal line is rounded. Xu Dachun was a celebrated physician, yet his treatment of the parts of the mouth is entirely phonological, not anatomical.

Read beside modern research, the “five sounds and four calls” prescribe the shape of the vocal tract, the filter of Chapters 2 and 3, and “emission, return and closing” correspond to the coarticulation of consonant, vowel and coda. The tradition puts the word first, unlike the Western classical habit of modifying vowels for resonance and the singer’s formant; how the two trade “word” against “sound” could be compared acoustically. But the “five sounds” are a phonological classification of initials, not a physiology of resonating cavities; they say nothing about the epilarynx or source–filter coupling.

“Turn the hearing back to hear one’s own nature”: as a metaphor

Volume 2 of this series, Turning the Hearing Inward, discussed this passage and its relation to auditory science at length; here we only stress its place in this book. In the sutra, “turning the hearing back” means turning attention away from the sounds that are heard to the nature of hearing itself, with absorption and liberation as its aim; it does not ask anyone to listen to bone-conducted sound, and it is not a method of voice training. Borrowing the passage as a metaphor for singing practice, moving attention from “controlling the voice” to “listening to sound and vibration”, is only a teaching metaphor (the author’s own teaching uses it, and he has an interest here; see the disclosure in the preface); its effects need testing by experiments like the hypothesis of Chapter 5, and it is a different matter from the religious meaning of the scripture.

Chapter summary

Shi Yi in the Record of Music defines song as “speech drawn out” and describes steady, joined singing as “a stop as still as a withered tree” and “a string of pearls”; this can be read beside source–filter tuning in sustained vowels and the control of pitch, but it is a discourse on aesthetics and feeling. The three kinds of piping in the Zhuangzi recall in form the same airflow sounding through different cavities and an oscillation that needs no “instigator”, but their meaning is forgetting the self and the equality of things. The Treatise on Singing and Transmitting the Sound of Yuefu represent a singing tradition centred on the word; the two sentences quoted in the framework could not be verified word for word and are only paraphrased. The Śūraṅgama Sūtra’s “turn the hearing back to hear one’s own nature” is used here only as a metaphor, and the line between religious practice and acoustic training must stay clear. The final chapter offers a checklist for practical use and a pre-registered trial.