How are countries that have languages that depend on tone able to have a music industry?

Question

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?

In: Other

Answer 1

Tonal languages do not rely on absolute pitch, but relative pitch.

So you can still slide around and “sing” tones. Of course a lot follows from context, but the tones are still sort of preserved.

But yes this absolutely partially forces the melody of the song.

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I can only really speak for Thai though. I can give you an example:

Listen to the very first line of this song (timestamp = 14 s)

Might be hard to pick out, but he’s singing, with word tones beneath:

jaak khon, khon tee koey mee jai gan yoo
low mid, mid fall mid mid mid mid low

Now listen to the melody. It goes:

E ↑ C♯ C♯ ↑ D ↓ C♯ ↓ B B B ↓ A

Maybe that doesn’t make sense, but whatever, you can still hear the melody start low, then go up, so the first word becomes low tonally relative to the mid word. Then it stays on mid until “tee” which is falling, and should start higher in pitch, so the melody does that too. Then we go back down to mid, linger there until we go down again. Here is a “problem” because the tone doesn’t change, but it’s actually ok because the words that follow are also mid so it’s still the same relative to *those* words, and even so context here makes it pretty clear what he’s singing about. Then finally we end on a low note, just as we’d like to. So you see the melody is not a coincidence.

Sometimes you have no choice and you want the melody to be exactly one way.. it can also work, because at least in Thai, all the tones have a pitch pattern which the follow: https://www.thailanguagehut.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Graph.jpg so as you see, as long as you follow the curve well, what the absolute pitch is doesn’t really matter, because all tones are unique anyway. Maybe it’s my imagination or bias, but I think it sounds like the singer is doing these tonal slides in the example above. With all these tools, implementing tones into singing is easy!