Composer Tze Yeung Ho sheds light on the close relationship between music and language.
Tze Yeung Ho has long been fascinated by the relationship between language and music. When applying for doctoral studies at the Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre, he set himself an ambitious goal: to compose a musical work that combined Estonian, Norwegian, and Cantonese - something that, to his knowledge, had never been done before. Working with these three languages also enabled him to draw extensively on examples from his own compositions.
"A writer can be a composer, and a composer can work with text," says Tze Yeung Ho. "When we speak, we create music."
For his doctoral research, Ho immersed himself in the field of phonetics. He studied how speech sounds are produced, selected, and classified. Beyond learning to read words, he learned to read sounds themselves.
"What possibilities are hidden here?" he recalls asking himself. "Could this sound be lower? Could it be stretched a little longer?"
With the guidance of Professor Jaan Ross, Ho developed a deeper understanding of how the human voice functions. He then applied phonetic analysis directly to his compositional practice.
Rather than treating speech as something fixed, Ho allowed musical considerations to shape the sounds themselves. The vocal sounds did not have to remain exactly as intended by the author of the text; instead, they were adapted according to the needs of the music. For Ho, this active dialogue with the material became an essential part of the creative process.
To support his research, he employed speech analysis software capable of visualising waveforms, speech patterns, and pitch contours. These visualisations helped him understand how the sonic qualities of language could serve as a source of musical inspiration. He also analysed musical compositions and scores to investigate how earlier composers constructed melody and how those approaches might inform his own work.
Ho's artistic research project, Phonetic Features as a Tool in Music Composition: From the Perspective of a Composer, culminated in a two-part doctoral concert.
