Turn a Tang poem
into a piece of music

Three steps to your piece

Every Chinese character carries a tone, and a tone is already a contour of pitch. Every Tang poem is built on rhetoric, and rhetoric is already musical structure. RhetoScore maps the four classical tones — level, rising, departing, entering — onto a pentatonic melodic skeleton, and maps rhetorical figures such as antithetical couplets, refrains and anadiplosis onto musical organisation: answering phrases, returning themes, interlocking motifs. The poem is not set to music — the poem already is music.