telophase | (no subject)

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Any Chinese speakers out there (or any tonal language)? I had one of those completely random questions occur to me out of the blue that's sort of nagging at me: how do Chinese pop singers deal with tones? I don't know very much about tones in spoken languages other than "they exist" anyway, so I have even less of a clue how you deal with them in singing, especially singing something that seems to me to be rather Western in structure (but I'm making that up, so I'm probably compltely off-base).

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I have passive fluency in Mandarin. I think the tones are largely missing in singing. At least, I can't understand Mandarin songs.

My father once told me that on Taiwanese TV, singing is often subtitled because it is often hard to understand even for native speakers. I don't know if that explanation is entirely true, but it is at least plausible as one of the reasons for subtitled singing.

Interesting. I'd expect that songwriters/signers would have to make sure they're not writing/singing something that could be accidentally misparsed as something unintentional.[1]

I wonder what traditional singing does with the tones? I'd think that there'd be some sort of structure in place to deal with it, but again I have no real idea.

(And I suppose I should call

homasse to explain anything she knows about Chinese rap, since she's indicated a passing familiarity with at least one singer who does it on occasion. XD)

[1] My favorite example of messing up tones is from Nigel Barley's The Innocent Anthropologist, a layman's account of his fieldwork in West Africa among the Dowayo, when he excused himself from a small gathering once by saying "Excuse me. I have to go cook some meat." Or so he thought. They all stared at him, then burst into gleeful hysterics, and eventually explained to him that he'd just said "Excuse me. I have to go copulate with the blacksmith." I expect most screwups turn into gibberish rather than that sort of thing, but still there's always the chance. :)

Traditional singing is very very sexy, man. I love my culture's traditional singing. Mostly because the lyrics tend to be so freaking good. <= this is not to say I don't like other cultures' traditional singing. I like traditional singing in general. But as a Chinese person and music-enjoyer in general, I'm totally, crazily nuts about *this* particular culture's music....

Back in the day, music and words are written by totally different people, spanning across centuries and thousands of kilometers. One genius guy will get very drunk and sentimental, and compose a grand (or sweet) piece of music, and then he'll die and that'll be the end of him. And then, the entire literary population will write at least one lyric to that piece of music at some point in their lives. Sometimes, one person will write 10 lyrics to the same piece of music. These lyrics are judged on two points: how well it fits the music (rhyme, rhytm, does the tones fit, etc) and its poetical excellence. With so many people writing lyrics, you are bound to get some pretty good ones, nyo...(and you do, and they get published and sung and remembered)

A category in Chinese publishing is the books of collected Tang and Song Dynasty poetry. Within this genre, poetry is split into poetry (your run-of-the-mill, scenic, political, romantic, balladic, etc poetry) and lyrics (like the ones I mentioned above). It is interesting to note that the character we associate with poetry in general today, in Chinese, is pronounced "uta" in Japanese, and "uta" means song/lyric (this character is brought over to Japan in the Heian Era, which is something like Late Tang Dynasty for us, I think). Lyrics were, and remained for a long time, a very large genre in poetry.

Oh no...I completely forgot about operas and folk songs....They are two very different kinds of fish....

Because there are so many dialects in China, operas and folk songs tend to be highly regional. So you'll have Cantonese Opera, Beijing Opera, etc.

Opera in China was kinda like a craft, a trade....a traveling group of story-telling actors...that kind of thing. Not arti-literati like Western opera. The audience were mostly poor, illiterate people looking for cheap entertainment. So, for the sake of making it easy for lay-people to understand what they are singing, operas develop conventions. Facial makeup, costume, movement-sequences all fall under "convention." Coventions for singing are elaborate. In Chinese opera, there are these "sequences of notes" stuff that every opera actor/composer/director/etc knows. These "sequences" correspond to tonal patterns in speech, so you would "sing" like you would "say," for the most part. Early operas were very impromptu, with the more successful ones being recorded and performed again and again (because they earn $$$). These successful ones get passed down the generations and become canonized by opera afficionadoes...

Folk songs are even less fancy than operas. Aside from stylistic differences between the regions in China, folk songs are also characterized by the speech patterns of the local dialects. This sounds...boring...when I explain it in words...but the localized songs are really really very beautiful >_

Cool, thanks; this is fascinating. :D

The drop the tones, at least in Mandarin--which makes understanding the lyrics pretty much a crapshoot sometimes. II asked a friend of mine what Jay Chou was singing in a new song (Initial D movie soundtrack! *squee*) and she laughed in my face, which is fairly impressive over the AIM, and even I had to laugh at the phenominally stupid of the question, since I've had several native Chinese speakers tell me that Jay is completely incomprehensible without the lyrics.

In Cantonese, they try to have the music follow what the tones would be, but that's not happening as often as it used to.

Music videoes tend to all have subtitles. But by the same token, when I was in China last year on vacation, I noticed that almost all the TV shows were subtitled. Maybe because there are so many dialects, even though Mandarin is the official one.

(And yeah, I forgot all my Chinese, but I have native Chinese-speaking friends, plus, this same question got asked waaaay back on the linguaphiles lj comm. ^_^ )

Heh, interesting. :) What about the rap? Same thing, or do they actually attempt to put the tones in?

(I'm going to d/l the Jay Chou stuff you sent shortly - your description was quite intriguing. XD)

According to the friend that ~~provided my first hit of crack~~ got me into Jay, the tones tend to get dropped in rap as well. It certainly sounds to me like the tones are gone, since spoken Chinese and rapped Chinese sound *nothing* alike from what I've heard.

when you sing in Chinese, you sing along the tones of the music, not the words.

HOWEVER, there are singing styles where the singer will sing off-key on a few notes for emphasis. These notes generally begin normally, and then in the middle of the note, it changes. To my knowledge, western singers do this too.

Composers for toned languages have an extra task of making the music fit the words, like Homasse said. However, this practice is being dropped, since it's preeeetty dang difficult, and it also gives the music a hard-to-describe quality that sometimes doesn't go well with Western listeners. In addition, since 99% of pop songs are about the Big Three (Love, Unrequited Love, Break-up), the collection of the same words occur again and again and again and....so yeah, it'd be hard to make up music that follows the tones AND still be unique and so on. Some singers, who've really made it big so they can stray from the "idol format," employ better lyricists and composers, so that their music *do* actually follow the tones of the words (prime example being Faye Wong, the current Queen of singing)

As for rap, I kinda see two schools emerging. However, since I don't quite like any kind of rap except parody rap (because parody rap tends to be toned, and is funny, dammit), I'm not reliable on this issue. One school imports American rap and completely discards the tones in Chinese, in favor of the inflection styles found in American rap. When I listen to this kind of rap, I'll be damned if I can tell if they're rapping Chinese, English, or Arabic. I can almost-kinda tell when it's German, though...

The less die-hards tend to inflect their rap with some tones, probably for the sake of comprehensibility. In the majority of cases where I find rap in the songs I listen to, the rap is only used for a sort of audial texture, and so the content isn't awfully important...

Cool, thanks! This is the sort of thing that makes me sad that my language-learning capacity is pretty close to nil - the differences are fascinating.

(I think it's not necessarily that my learning capacity is close to nil, it's my studying and talking to other people capacities that are at fault. XD)

Word to everything you just said.

Language difference is fascinating as long as you aren't being tested on it.

haha XD

Well, English has loads to offer too nyo~

Like in ideogaphic languages, everytime someone discovers a new elemental substance, all the dictionaries, fonts, IME's, and so on, have to be updated. These languages evolve slowly and painfully...

Not like English, you can make new words by just typo-ing. Words like "Glomp," "facevault," etc....are so much fun ;_;

bpggle and I decided a few years ago that "bpggle" was a good word after I typoed "boggle" in an email to him. We decided it was like boggling, only more so.

bpggle and I also derive great entertainment from reading words and definitions in bigger dictionaries - the ones that contain all sorts of obsolete and obscure words. How else would we have discovered that drunk people are "spifflicated" and that the act of gathering acorns is "glandage"?

My favorite definition, ever, was "Spanker boom: a boom for the spanker." It excels in telling precisely what it is, without actually presenting any meaning (it has to do with boats and sails). My faovrite tool, which I came across in a nomenclature book I used when I was working in a museum, is a 'barking spud,' which is from the forestry industry and presumably has something to do with stripping bark from trees, instead of being a woofing potato. And there's a specific word for the all-nighter, last-minute design push that architecture students go through when completing major assignments: 'charrette,' from the French for a cart used to collect the final drawings in a 19th century French architecture school.

*_*
:saves it all in a little (large) text file:

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