How can they sing if changing a tone might change the meaning of a word? Doesn’t the “tonal direction” upward/downward of a word affect a melody?
How do those systems combine?
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I’m not a native speaker, but I’ve been learning Mandarin for a year or two and I listen to Chinese music semi-regularly, and my takeaway has been that tones are pretty much ignored when singing. I’ve seen some Chinese people saying that tones aren’t actually that important in regular speech either, and that context is much more useful, but I think that mostly applies to new speakers like me who aren’t very good at keeping their tones consistent, and I’ve had at least one instance of confusion when I’ve mixed up my tones (想 [xiǎng, to want or miss] and 像 [xiàng, to be like]).
A quick Google suggests that some singers, especially those who sing in Cantonese, do sometimes make an effort to match tones to melody for artistic reasons, but it’s not universal.
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