Songs in the key of life: The linguistic universals of adapting sound to artistic expression

A new study of how tone languages are sung has implications for the way humans manipulate and adapt the sounds of their language to artistic expression. The study, “Tone-tune association in Tommo So (Dogon) folk songs”, by Laura McPherson (Dartmouth College) and Kevin Ryan (Harvard University), will be published in the March, 2018 issue of the scholarly journal Language.