Tone Systolic

The systolic (tone1) or first tone is the lowest and coarsest tonal overtone of the fundamental tone. Therefore, it is also called the first overtone. One often gets the impression that this is a melodic sound, but its characteristic feature is the ability to form a rise in the initial sound, which interrupts the melodic line and leads to a pause or stop in speech. For example, we can take the following excerpt from a dialogue in French, when the interlocutor says the phrase “Mais je ne pense pas qu’il y ai”, tone1 sounds after the phrase “Il est [omission] que la lumière le nuit”:

“I also don’t think so, that the day(s) will come before the night (missed).” Typically, Tone 1 can be seen at the beginning of an utterance, ending it. This allows us to draw conclusions about the emotional coloring of speech and understand the speaker’s intonation. The tonal duration may be slightly more than half the time interval of the utterance. If you are attentive and well prepared, you will be able to hear tone 1 even when communicating with native speakers.