Tone describes the use of pitch in speech sounds to distinguish lexical or grammatical meaning. Lexical tones can follow a vowel or syllabic consonant. They can be made up of simple levels, on a universal scale which has a maximum of five level contrasts, or they can be contours composed of sequences of tones. A sequence of three tones should be sufficient to describe any tone contour.

IPA contains a mixture of lexical tones and contour tones. UPS covers the five lexical tones found in IPA, plus upstep and downstep. All contour tones can be represented in UPS by compound tones.

UPS does not include tonal symbols for the following IPA symbols: Rising, Falling, High Rising, Low Rising and Rising-Falling. These can all be defined in UPS using tone sequences. Global Rise and Global Fall are equivalent to "intonation - fall" and "intonation - question rise" in UPS and are found in Suprasegmentals (Microsoft.Speech).