Tonal
Encyclopedia
Tonal may refer to:
- Tonal (mythology)Tonal (Mythology)Tonal is a concept within the study of Mesoamerican religion, myth, folklore and anthropology. It refers to the belief found in many indigenous Mesoamerican cultures that a person upon being born acquires a close spiritual link to an animal, a link that lasts throughout the lives of both creatures...
, a concept appearing in the belief systems and traditions of Mesoamerican cultures, involving a spiritual link between a person and an animal - a tonal languageTone (linguistics)Tone is the use of pitch in language to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning—that is, to distinguish or inflect words. All verbal languages use pitch to express emotional and other paralinguistic information, and to convey emphasis, contrast, and other such features in what is called...
, a classification of languages where some combination of high-low pitch has a phonemic distinction - tonalityTonalityTonality is a system of music in which specific hierarchical pitch relationships are based on a key "center", or tonic. The term tonalité originated with Alexandre-Étienne Choron and was borrowed by François-Joseph Fétis in 1840...
, a system of writing music involving the relationship of pitch to some centered key - Tonal System is a hexadecimal (base 16) system of notation, arithmetic, and metrology proposed by Nystrom in 1859.