Chinese Music in Advertisement

Ever wondered why is there a distinct knowledge when traditional chinese music is applied to advertisement? You might think that this is because the musical instrument used? You might think that those tunes are wellknown chinese tunes?

Music has always been used as a medium of marketing. Pepsi Co. has a group of artists singing their theme song every year, some of these songs even make it to the charts and became hits in billboards.

What is distinctively chinese comes from the unique composing technique that utilizes only 5 of the vocals instead of the 7 we are so familiar with. Typical traditional chinese song composing technique uses Do, Re, Mi, So, La only. Fa and Ti are excluded in most compositions. Chinese think that Fa and Ti are not full tone vocals and this might have shaped the chinese flavour that we know today.

For musician readers, you might have a question whether Chinese only know about Do, Re, Mi, So, La? The answer is NO. Chinese is perhaps the first who discovered the full 7 vocal tones with the escavation of an ancient chinese musical instrument named: Pian Chong. It is a gigantic musical percussion instrument which can be considered as the first complete tone intrument. In fact, the first chinese musical artifact was dated 7000 year old. It is an egg-like wind instrument made of clay.

Remember Tan Dun who created the theme song of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon? You might be interested to revisit the song again to differentiate the tones. Cheers.