How do Chinese people sing using tones for both melody and words?

Question

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?

In: 48

Answer 1

The pitch aspect of tones in tonal languages are relative, rather than absolute like in music. The songs sang in tonal language are usually composed in a way that would accommodate the tonal aspect of the words, e.g., a high tone would sit on a relatively higher note in the melody.