tonal

Those tonal shifts are a lot more obvious than the ones in Chinese.

Though he says that tonal languages are 'weird', I found it to be a bit more troublesome than that.

Doubly so in text without tonal and non-verbal cues of how statements are meant.

Since this is tonal music, it obviously includes the I chord.

It's very hard to hear and reproduce the tonal marks correctly, yet that can completely change the meaning of words.

Not seeing the tonal disagreement in P1 - that looks like a fairly legit dissection of the assumptions in an argument to me. What phrasing made you feel it was tonal?

Chinese speakers rely on context as much as tonality to distinguish similar-sounding words.

Schoenberg knew this perfectly well -- he published the bible for the theory of tonal harmony -- and never argued against it, as is claimed in this article.

Although the Chinese logographic writing system seems hopeless to an outsider, it is uniquely suited to the to tonal Chinese language.

#1 has more immediate textural/tonal exploration, while #2 is a more gradual evolution.

Your initial tonal interpretation was one of many possibilities.

As a lifelong monotone English speaker, I was actually unable to hear tonal differences that changed the meaning of words during my short attempt at learning Chinese.

Its just worth keeping in mind that this has relatively little to do with serial composition as practiced by its originators, who really were trying for a genuinely atonal approach.

I think we probably currently lack the neurological understanding to reliably gauge by any means what tonal context a listener is holding in their mind, but to this layman it seems like a surmountable challenge.

After 6 months it appeared to almost overnight become something sensible to me at which point I had to relearn almost my entire vocabulary including the tonal information that I'd been unknowingly ignoring.

The correct way to notate that is with either a modal key signature a la Bartok or notate it as D with a constant natural on the C, showing that the tonal center is D while clearly notating the departure from the traditional major scale.

Most pop music lines are designed to project a tonal center pretty well, if only by the relatively crude means of just harping on the tonic and related chord tones rather than strictly cadencing, so I think even your average non-musician would have a good sense of the key if a single person with decent pitch were singing such a line in public.