I’ve been a fan of the Chinese singer Faye Wong for a couple years now and have always wondered this.
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In music, you sing to the melody by matching the pitch of the word.
In Chinese, the defining tones of words have no specific pitch. They are about the change in pitch.
The four Mandarin tones are defined as flat, rising, fall and rise, and falling.
These can be whatever pitch you want to sing them to as long as you sing them with the change in pitch as well.
Sing in the desired tone.
Not really any different than singing: “Live, baby Live” sounds different and means something different when INXS sings it on a record versus when they sing it in concert in Wembly Stadium.
Native singers and listeners understand the “rules” of their language within which you can sing words dramatically different than you would say them.
Think about English – sung words are often radically different than their spoken form. Say when drawing out a word in a song it’s not uncommon to go back and forth over a pair of vowel sounds – think the Beetles “I want to hold your hand” – write that out the way they sing it and it’d be something like “I want to hold your haaaaahahnd”. It’s nowhere near “hand” really, but as a competent English language user your brain can easily and immediately take enough context and process it so the words are readily intelligible to you.
Want to go insane? Listen to this poem being recited.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vExjnn_3ep4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vExjnn_3ep4)
Tone can still be maintained because it is *relative* pitch, not absolute pitch.
But yes, this does impose some limitations when writing song melodies.
More importantly, what do you do if you’re tone deaf?
Its crazy to a non tonal language person. My friend is Hmong (whos language is based on Chinese) and there are literally 8 words that (to me) sound *exactly* the same, but each 8 have a completely different meaning.
I think you adapt these things in different languages because of different expectations and rules for making acceptable sounds for songs.
Like English often tries to make “rhymes” (ending of words is same) but in other languages this is either very difficult or is too easy, so that “rhyme” is less important and they might focus on other things like assonance or rhythm of words.
And usually, there is some license in songs that allows you to break rules and still create some meaning from context.
Of course, always there are lyrics like made by REM that are more about the sounds of the words than a literal, sensical meaning.
As a Bilingual Mandarin and English speaker (who also speaks Cantonese), I would say that we use mainly context to understand songs. The context also allows us to understand speakers who have accents and don’t nail the tones 100%.
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