This really may be an absolutely stupid question, but it’s been bugging me for a long time. Mandarin for instance is highly dependent on tone changes to say different words, but (pop)music takes away that ability because it takes away from the tune and melody. How does anybody make music that makes sense? Or can my western ears not pick up the small tonal changes they sing?
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TL;DR
1) Melody doesn’t necessarily take away from the tone, so singing can still have proper tone and be easily understood.
2) Proper tone isn’t necessary for understanding the language. There are many regional accents in Cantonese/Mandarin just like in English (eg. London vs. Jersey Shore accents) which sounds totally different from each other and yet is still the same language. Fluent speakers can potentially understand multiple regional accents, depending on whether they have past exposure to them.
—–Long Version—–
Unsure if I’m understanding the question correctly but here’s my experience with Mandarin, Cantonese, and my hometown dialect (unsure what the dialect is called).
You don’t lose the tone when putting melody on it. You can still sing in a tune/melody while maintaining the tone of the words, understanding it is not an issue at all.
Certain music, such as rap, does cause some changes to the tone of the words. I’ve heard rap songs where the singer “mispronounce” words on purpose such as using a “wrong” tone in order to rhyme or make the rhythm sound better. In this case, the listener usually can understand the intended meaning based on context.
However I have also heard songs that changed the tones so much in order to make it sound a certain way, that I have trouble understanding the meaning. This is most common in rap and hiphop style music, which is similar to English rap and hiphop also, there’s slangs and accents used to make the words sound certain ways instead of pronouncing it normally. However this mispronounciation is planned and intended for a certain style or sound, and is not because the singer is unable to use proper tone. Its just cause the singer or songwriter decided that the song sounds better with a mispronounced tone, or it could be a slang.
I’m sure there’s other nuances that I’m not familiar with. Just in my experience listening to songs, the pronunciation can be correct while still following the melody, so I do not think tune and melody “takes away” from the tone of the language at all. Perhaps its harder for non-native speakers to understand the words in a song because it affects the way tone is perceived by the non-native speaker when melody is superimposed, but I’ve always felt the tone is preserved in the songs. However, I also understand accented Mandarin so maybe I’m not the best judge of proper tone. There’s so many dialects in Chinese and everyone’s Mandarin is “improper” cause of their dialect causing an accent on their Mandarin but usually people still all understand each other, so maybe native speakers are just really good at understanding the language regardless of tone? To be honest, when I speak to other Mandarin speakers, everyone’s pronunciation with tone is actually quite incorrect, and I find that the tone is more correct in songs than in everyday speech. Usually the singers don’t have super strong accents in their songs.
Hope this answers the question.
ETA: I revisited some songs that completely butcher the tone. My final verdict is that, it is not true that tone is necessary to understand the language. I can still understand most of the language in the absence of tone. So I think its just experience with the language. It is more difficult to understand for non-native speakers because you don’t have the same familiarity and also experience of talking and understanding people with strong accents who don’t use the correct tone anyway. It’s like British English vs Jersey Shore English, both are English but also totally different in pronunciation. Some people understand both and some people understand neither, even when fluent in English. It is the same for Cantonese or Mandarin, I can understand some people with strong regional accents from certain areas but not from other areas.
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