Culture #1 - Chinese Culture
![Picture](/uploads/2/3/0/1/23011308/5865018.jpg?359)
Duration: The Chinese piece is 3 minutes and 50 seconds. The piece is very slow and calm. There are dynamic contrasts between different melody lines and different instruments create communication with each other. The song sounds very religious just like the music video, a woman dressed in a white dress in a forest with streams flowing.
Pitch: The pitch of the woman singing in this music piece is very high. It is demonstrated by the thinness of her sound: As she goes to higher notes, her voice becomes thinner, but as she goes below the note, her voice becomes thicker. By using those contrasts of pitch, the piece becomes much richer than using different melodic lines.
Timbre/Tone color: The music is sung by a famous Chinese singer, Gongwei, from long time ago. She was famous for very thin and clean sound that fitted perfectly with the contemporary Chinese music. This music piece is one of the few songs Gongwei sung. The whole song is very calm and bouncy for some reason and I think those are the beauties of traditional Chinese music. Even though the rhythm is slow, by using clean sounding instruments, they create somewhat bouncy rhythm.
Texture: There are verse, chorus and bridge but same chords are used just that they are switched around while the music goes from verse to chorus or from chorus to bridge. Chinese traditional string instruments provide advanced rhythmic play during the music and they improvise while Gongwei does not sing. Various textures offer more direct message sent to the audience and make the mood more clear to understand.
Dynamics: Chinese woman singer, Gongwei continuously uses crescendos and decrescendos to dynamically contrast one another to create more calm feeling. She also ends her long notes with vibration to add more feelings towards the notes just like Korean ballad singers to touch the listeners of what they try to say by singing a specific song. The instrumentals also are filled with dynamics contrast to boost the calm and religious feeling.
Form & Structure: The entire piece is in 4/4 time signature. The rhythm stays the same in the entire piece and the drums plays upbeat to make the bouncy feeling also in the quiet music pieces. The traditional string instruments are just playing the 4 chords repeated to supply the basis and bone structure for the whole piece.