How do you sing a tonal language?
HTML-код
- Опубликовано: 1 авг 2024
- Next up: The secret to learning ANY language
How do you sing a tonal language?
If you enjoyed the video, consider leaving a like! If you really liked the video, consider subscribing!
Often times, as English speakers, we take singing and song writing for granted. For people speaking tonal languages, this is not the case. Due to the fact that tonal languages require tonality to speak and songs require tonality to sing there becomes a problem when the two mix. What happens when the tones of words do not match the tone of the music accompanying them?
Sources:
Schellenberg, Murray. "Singing in a tone language: Shona." Selected Proceedings of the 39th Annual Conference on African Linguistics. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project, 2009.
Ladd, D. Robert, and James Kirby. "Tone-Melody Matching in tone-Language Singing." (2020).
2:55 correction: 倪 (ní) instead of 兒 (ér)
I believe both are correct, 兒 means both ér and “Ni (a vassal state of the Zhou Dynasty, to the southeast of the present-day Tengzhou County (滕州县), Shandong Province).” But thanks for letting me know! I’ll pin your comment to help others with the same concern!
@@LeafNye I think because it's normally read as ér which is super common in Chinese words. To read ní like this is not common. if I type "ni" on a pinyin keyboard, 兒 variant is way down the bottom lol. But it's not that big of a deal, cool video.
@@LeafNye oh damn thanks for the clarification
@@LeafNye i did some research and found that 兒 is only sometimes pronounced as ní as a surname because the some west Zhou vassel state (邾) royal family apparently changed their surname from 郳 (ní) to 兒 (ní) after the vassel state was conquered by Chu.
@@Syuvinyafun fact, the 兒 radical in 倪 is the phonetic part, showing that the ní pronunciation is old enough and at the time widely known enough to have come from that character. A synonym for 兒 according to the modern pronunciation is 儿, which is basically the one character that is always read as ér.
In Vietnamese, they actually match the tones of the lyrics to the pitch of the music, tones rarely get dropped, because it will be heard super awkwardly. But in Mandarin, especially modern music, they often just ignore the tones, even if a native heard a song for the first time it'd be quite hard to understand the meaning of the lyrics.
Interesting!
Same in Cantonese, you have to match the tones as possible as you can, even in modern pop music
I agree, but I also have to say that the tones in viet songs might divert a little bit, HOWEVER, it still goes in the general direction of the true tone. I have never encountered a situation where I was like "damn, I need to guess that word based on the context because I can't make out it's true tone.
@@lolhcdhow about Lac Troi by Son MTP? That was my first exposure to "Viet-pop(?)"/Nhac Tre. I remember showing to my parents and they were confused as F cuz they couldn't understand most of his singing & rapping. And I remember seeing, I think JRodTwins doing that song and saying the same as well, or how difficult that song is lyrically.
@@AntTonyLOLKID aren't the jrod twins half viet and thai or so but their main mother tongue is thai? Anyway, I just listened to it, even the rap part and I could understand it without lyrics and tried to guess the tone symbols of the many words that aren't in my vocab. I watched it later a little with lyrics to test if my guessed were right and it was fine.
Now, I gotta confess that when viets sing most songs (except for the traditional country side song), everyone tries to sing in a northern accent/dialect style bc apparently, it sounds more sophisticated. Similar to UK and Australian singers tend to sound more American in their songs (not entirely though and also not due to the same reasons).
Rapping in Viet.... is not my cup of tea bc it sounds awful to me, I do sometimes lose sense of what the words they are rapping mean but it's not rlly detrimental haha. But yeah, I can see why your parents and in general, the tones of the woedsnbecome more diluted.
In Cantonese, especially "canto pop" in Hong Kong, the music creator and the lyricist are two different professions. Professional lyricists are able to listen to a piece of music, and match up the notes with appropriate words, while maintaining the overall message of the song. This adds another layer of difficulty and depth to the song and to the listeners. Listeners often get a second layer of appreciation and excitement when the words' native notes completely match up with the song in the most natural way, while conveying the message in a crafty manner. This second layer of appreciation doesn't exist while listening to songs in non-tonal languages such as English, basically the artist can write whatever they want into the song with much less constraints. It's great but a good canto pop song lyrics are often appreciated on its own, separated from the music, like a piece of stand alone art, or a poem, because it is really difficult to get it right.
Unfortunately, there have been literally tonnes of bad grammatical errors and indecipherable rubbish as well. Here are the 2 most infamous examples:
每一颗友善笑声 from Paula Tsui 顺流逆流. 颗 is incorrect, as you cannot count laughter by this, which usually used for small, rounded objects. 😅
张开口像救生圈 from Monica by the late Leslie Cheung. WTF does open your mouth like life buoy means??😂
@@kennywong4239because it's extremely hard to get it right😂
i've also heard that good poems also have this "yin" "yang" balance of tones which makes them sound better too
The second layer of appreciation could also happen if the tones are so poorly matched that they would sound like something totally absurd. Example: 主能夠
There is still *something* to English even though it is admittedly less. Since English is a stress-timed language, we have to align the longer notes, which are usually the downbeats, with the stressed syllables of the sentence, for it to sound good. The ánts go márching óne by óne, hurráh, hurráh... and Mine éyes have séen the glóry óf the cóming óf the Lórd. There's a really good recent video by Geoff Lindsey on weak forms that...well, it does something similar. It's a hoot.
In Mandarin, we completely ignore tones in language and solely concentrate on the musical pitch. Therefore, we must watch the lyrics to avoid confusing the meaning.
Here's another interesting thing: Many foreigners struggle to master the tones of Mandarin even after decades of practice. However, when they sing a Mandarin song, their pronunciation can sound as perfect as that of a native speaker because native Mandarin speakers completely ignore tones in music. Next time, if you want to surprise your native Mandarin friend, try singing a Mandarin song🤣
I disagree. What you say is actually true for Japanese singing and pitch accents, but accents in mandarin doesn't come from tones, it comes from a variety of places.
Also, it's not that mandarin songs ignore tones IMO. It's that tones and pitches don't really have much to do with each other in mandarin. You can't match a tone to a particular note; a tone is about the change in pitch.
@@user-nj9ru4ef2wbut we do ignore tones in mandarin songs
Not true at all. It's almost always possible to understand the lyrics just from the context. For example, don't tell me you get confused listening to 一翦梅 (Xue Hua Piao Piao).
In mandarin songs you can follow the tones or completely ignore them as well, it's up to you. With only four far-stretching tones, anywhere the rythmes change words can fit in.
@@johnnyq4260最近B站上不是火了一个梗吗？那个“海底两万米”一直被空耳成“海底两碗米”😂
I'm Thai. Singing words in our language tends to preserve the tones integrity as much as the melody allows. When tones and melody don't go together well, it will sound unnatural and awkward, and it's mostly a lyricist job to ensure it doesn't sound too awkwardly. Tones tend to be sung more relatively to how the melody goes, like, you'd find bunch of words with tones raised over mid level when melody ascend in pitch and vice versa. The more commonly used words, especially the functional word and usually unstressed word can hide well in a monotonous line of melody that has same consecutive pitch, since those words and syllable can gain atonality in normal speech.
I'm a native Brazilian Portuguese speaker, so you know, Latin language, very melodic and all. Then I started watching Thai BL because I found the naturality with which male-on-male relationships are usually treated in them refreshing. Being gay is just treated as the most natural thing in the world more often than not. But I soon started getting annoyed by Thai media. Beside the weird tropes that I hate so common to Asian media, (like the "I stalk because I love you", the "I raped you because I love you so much I couldn't control myself", the "annoying effeminate gay guy without boundaries", etc), I just couldn't stand the Thai language. Your culture is so fascinating and beautiful, but (don't be offended) your language just sounded so incredibly irritating to my Latin ears, lol. All the tone and pitch changes, and all the songs that sounded so weird, just made my brain hurt. I soon realized that other tonal languages, like Cantonese, caused the same aversion in me. No wonder I think Japanese, which isn't very tonal, is the most beautiful Asian language I know.
@@guilhermesavoya2366 Yeah, that's one common sentiment people have with asian tonal language. Coming from a language with less restrict intonation and many vowel adornment will make you feel weird encountering a language with seemingly unpredictable melody.
Anyway, I love BL too. There are some good songs from those show, lol.
@@guilhermesavoya2366canto and viet sound worst tho, thai is somewhat tolerable lol.
Btw despite your complaining are you still watching thai BL? I'm planning to watch but don't know what and where to start to watch BL series/movies.
I’m also amazed how Thai music also usually preserves the length of the vowels in words, for example อะ (a) versus อา (aa).
@@ericscavetta2311 In songs, the length of the syllables can be changed if needed.
Note: อะ (a) and อา (aa) actually have different sounds even when lengthening the อะ. The shape of the mount when saying อา (aa) is wider vertically.
Mandarin Chinese -- even with tones, one syllable can have 20 different meanings (just like English's "different meanings for a word"). People understand, in context. Song lyrics can use the pitch of the music and be understood most of the time, because the words are used in context.
I am the sun, and the air,
of a shyness which is criminally vulgar.
I am son and heir, of nothing in particular.
Exactly.
@@sallylauper8222 What's that from?
In China, there are so many other Chinese languages and dialects spoken other than Mandarin, which mean so many different accents. Some accents do a good job of retaining tone, and some accents screw it all up. If we couldn't understand based on context, then we couldn't understand anyone with a strong accent.
You killed that video in one simple take. LOL
thats why for some Chinese songs, people can add subtitles to them using alternative lyrics that twist the pronunciation and tone a little bit to form new lyrics. These new lyrics are often humorous in nature and your brain just cant help but hearing these alternative lyrics because the subtitles suggestively push the brain towards the alternative interpretation of the lyrics. An example in English would be the original song being "I'm 14 carats" and twisted lyric being "I'm a farting carrot". These are easier to do in Chinese as chinese can twist tones in addition to just pronunciation.
Like Bob Dylan “The ants are my friends” Blowing in the Wind
This is done a lot in Spanish with English songs. It’s usually just small parts of the song, like a sentence or a couple of words. They put subtitles in Spanish, and when you read them it kinda sounds like they are actually saying it lol it’s used a lot for memes, like they’ll put a POV or a context on the top and then the fragment of the song. It’s also done in English with English songs
@@agme8045As a spanish learner I didn’t know that! Can you link me any
I'm from Myanmar, and our language is also tonal. But the tones are actually not that varied since we only got three, which makes writing music while keeping that tonal sound easy. There's rarely any cases where the singer has the change the tone to match the melody.
Was looking for a comment about Burmese! Thanks!
I don't know much about the Myanmar language unfortunately, but I love your script. It's probably the most visually pleasing writing method of any language in my opinion
@@osasunaitor yeah. I always think it's kinda like the Timelord's language irl.
My Burmese friend writing looked so organized with cool circles and sht while I can't even write my Thai alphabet with a proper rounded head on each letter.😭
What are your languages?
@@Science_Atrium Well... I speak both Burmese and English fluently, tho I'd say my Burmese reading and writing isn't as good as my English since I attended international schools which focused on it more.
I know a little bit of Japanese, Chinese and Thai as well, which I'm actively practicing speaking. My old school also made me learn Indonesian till grade 6, but never taught us how to use it practically. I'm 16 now so my Indo knowledge has gotten really rusty.
In Vietnamese the tones of the words always have to match the music, otherwise it'd sound cringey and awkward. Seriously. There's simply no other way around it. I'm honestly quite impressed with how our writers and singers managed to pull it off
I can see how this would work for level tones at different pitch heights, but how does this work with contoured tones? Are there actually upwards and downwards slurs in the melody within individual syllables? Are there melismatic syllables stretched across multiple notes?
@@andrewparke1764 It's magic of our musicians, they always put the right word in the right note or it will be super weird
I don't know much about music. But I know in Ha Noi Music Academy, they taugh students : if anyone want to be a professional singer they must sing "Tròn Vành Rõ chữ" - It's meaning "correct and clear" other otherwise you can't be a good singer.
The natives would not consciously know how to graph their tones, nor would they understand any specialist terms of yours.
That's why they do not care. Even one note per syllable is common (not the only way to do so).
@@andrewparke1764 It's hard to say but I believe we add some slight slurring during singing, even if there's only one note in the sheet. Also, we feel the tones by comparing the pitches among the notes in one melody.
There's other ways, too. For example, there're two downward tones in Vietnamese, namely "huyền" and "nặng". Huyền is a pitch starting at the midtone, going downward slowly, and finally reaching a not-too-low pitch. Nặng is a pitch starting at the midtone, remaining for a short amount of time, then abruptly dropping in pitch, and discontinued - you will feel like there's a sudden break in the sound. When singing, these tones are often reserved for low notes, and if you don't sing it very clearly, "nặng" can be heard as "huyền" - to make it clear, you make an early, short, sudden stop when you sing, it feels like you're dropping the pitch, but actually the note doesn't change its pitch remarkably.
One contoured tone is "hỏi", which is very difficult to sing. A lot of singers sacrifice clarity and change it to other tones. In Bóng cây Kơ-nia, for instance, the lyrics start with "Buổi sáng em làm rẫy", where "buổi" has the "hỏi" tone. In the song, It's a very high note, so for many sopranos, it's extremely hard to articulate the "hỏi" tone and the sound will be easy to be replaced by "buôi" with the "huyền" tone, which is "c*ck" in English. To avoid this, many singers will sing "Trời sáng...", with the "huyền" tone.
@@drgothmania Thanks! This is the level of detail I was looking for.
In Norwegian, the tones basically always follow the pitch of the music. Although there are a huge amount of minimal pairs distinguished only by the tone, the members of each pair normally belong to two different grammatical classes (such as one noun and one verb), so the context is enough to understand the meaning in almost every case. There are some exceptions though, such as the words for "farmers" and "beans", and I'm sure you could make a funny song based on that ambiguity.
Watching Norwegian series, sometimes i feel like this language somehow sounds similar to Thai
So you guys have about 3 hit songs or is 4 now?
That last part actually depends on the dialect as well (when doesn't it?) since I would actually pronounce the d in "bønder"/farmer.
That's interesting. I don't know that there is a tonal language in EU
@@hhnguyen1210in Africa there are tonal or even click languages
A lot of music videos also include the subtitles as a part of the design to avoid confusion. But it does make you wonder how native speakers understand a song they've never heard before with no context and a melody that completely violates the natural pitch patterns. 🤔 I guess they're so used to recognizing certain groups of words that they automatically synthesize the meaning despite the lack of correlating tones.
As a person who can speak Mandarin, my experience is that the context makes most things clear. I've pretty much never heard a song where I couldn't understand the lyrics without looking at them.
@@emitain8408wait till you meet jay chou
People simply make fun of those songs and mock the song creators.
tbh it's hard to hear all the words in songs sung in English too
Sounds like "every modern pop song out there" to me
Somebody who can rap in those languages rhyming both the sound and the tone is automatically superior to Eminem.
JIN is a damn good battle rapper, but he rhymes almost exclusively in English. I've never heard any Chinese rap that was even close to good, nor have any of my Chinese friends. I'm hoping you can prove me wrong!
normally when Thais rap, or on nearly all Thai's song. They just move every word's tone to the music's tone. Sometime if it's not melodically, they just straight up use the word's tone.
I guess Myanmar is on that list. Most of the ppl here rap hella good, they also sound pretty good and maintain both the song's tone AND the tonal language itself!
Check out "Hmoob Zaj - Shong Lee", a Hmong rap song from a very talented Hmong rapper Shong Lee. Enjoy!
I think you're somewhat missing another tactic that's frequently used, and that is to overlay the tones onto the melody. IE The basic melody is retained, but the tones of the words are micro melodies overlaid on the main melody. It's a bit like adding Vibrato. I've noticed this as a fairly common technique as well.
Pentatonic scale for actual melody, and bending up or down towards adjacent semitones following the manner of tone contour in lyrics.
yes! i can't believe this hasn't been mentioned
appoggiatura
In Navajo, there is a bit more of a clear cut between tone, but the change in tone usually relates to each other is what I have found, like ‘anii’ meaning face, ‘áníí’ meaning nostril, and ‘aníí’ meaning poop. It only has two tones so the range is not as diverse as it is in Mandarin or Cantonese
Fascinating.
In a lot of Chinese opera, I've noticed that lyrics are much more understandable when a single word is stretched over a long melodic line. In some ways this happens in languages where there are multiple syllables and this aids the listener in parsing the lyrics because you have more time to interpret a word by placing it in context. However, in Western music, most of the time it's better to match each syllable to one note, because it can add up if you're dividing syllables into multiple notes, and this ends up dragging a song down. In Chinese, since almost all words are single syllable, stretching a word out over a melodic line can go a long way in helping a listener parse. You don't have to do it with every single word to make it comprehensible, and you can even include the word's original tonal direction within that melodic line without disrupting the overall arc. The songs from the classical Dream of Red Mansions employ this very well; one example is ruclips.net/video/7A08gPSyMxo/видео.htmlsi=CvrBCv6ucqNXbE8g. Obviously one problem with this is that it doesn't work so well in a fast-paced song, but even such songs would "linger", so to speak, over an important word to emphasize it, and these accents can go a long way to help the listener know what the overall gist is.
Kinda grateful my native language isn't tonal.
Same
I've been taught to regard tones as throat positions rather than fully equating their meaning to pitch. While this helped me with spoken Mandarin, I can fully attest that singing in these languages is still cancer. Xue hua piao piao slaps though.
graf
Sans Granie
the Hmong language (a fairly small language in China, Laos and Vietnam) has 8 tones, which conveniently fit into the solfege, (do, re, mi, fa, so, la ,ti, do) except that the tones obviously correlate to their own. The Hmong language however also has a very rich tradition of music, which probably explains why that is. Western pop music is a bit harder to correlate with, however traditional songs are always based off of the 8 tones.
I love Hmong music! And the Hmong language as well. I wish there were more resources to learn it.
Wow really different than Vietnamese. Vietnamese has 6 tones so it doesn't fit in solfege. In Vietnamese the tone is chosen relative to the previous note. If the note is higher than the previous note with a level tone á or ã is likely chosen. If it's lower and the previous used tone was á or ã, a, à or ạ can be choosen. If the previous used tone is a (level tone)and you want to go lower only à or ạ can be choosen
One more thing to add. Hmong has a rich, complex consonant inventory (54-56 consonants), so it kind of helps that there are not that many homophones (usually one is common and the other is not as common, but context needs to be considered).
Hi, Mandarin and Taiwanese hokkien native speaker here. I rarely comment on videos but I thought this was a interesting point you brought up and a very good question I have came upon myself.
I must say that while tones are important in the Chinese language in general, it's also an extremely contextural language, hence why most of the time we would still understand completely when foreigners make tonal mistakes.
It's true that words share same syllable and sound but different tones such as the "ma" example you have brought up, but as a native speaker, we are very used to deducting information from sentence structures and patterns that even without tones we are still able to distill the meaning of each phrase even without tonal information. So while that does pose an extra layer of difficulty while understanding pop songs sung in Chinese or Taiwanese, if we listen carefully as a native speaker and listen to the melody one complete phrase at a time, we're still able to get the meaning :-)
I'm not sure about other tonal langauge, but this is at least for Mandarin Chinese. Hope that makes sense!
Do Taiwanese lyrics match tones with pitch? Or is that only a Canto thing?
As a native mandarin speaker,actually I never heard any song matches tones with pitch. Maybe I’ve never think it.
@@alienfromy I haven't really heard of a song which matches tones with pitch either...🤔
@@maxxiong Does that happen a lot in Cantonese songs? I haven't heard of one specifically that does it in either Taiwanese Hokkien or Mandarin.
@@OmguacHi! In Cantonese the tone and melody matching actually happen in MOST of the Cantonese songs, at least if they're written by professional songwriters. So yes I would say it happens a lot. Professional songwriters are trained to write Cantonese lyrics through trying to match the tones with the melody
For contour tone languages like Chinese languages, the tone on a syllable can be dropping/rising etc, and some music does a great job of representing this in the melody, and I believe this fluctuation of pitch even within one note really contributes to the vibe of traditional oriental music
How is this accomplished? Melismatic syllables stretched across multiple notes?
@@andrewparke1764 appoggiatura
I had this thought over 10 years ago, but no one understood my question. And here I am, you answered my question. I feel acknowledged!
It's worth noting that non-tonal languages have similar songwriting challenges. There is often some amount of tonal information, such as indicating a question in English, as well as conventional tone patterns in how words are said depending on how they are used. But probably the biggest consideration for a non-tonal language is rhythm. There is a natural rhythm to how words and phrases are said, and a song can sound very bad if it doesn't adhere to it. As I understand it, the singer's melody and lyrics are usually made together so that they are consistent with each other in this regard.
I'm not saying tonal languages don't also need to consider this. I would presume that they do. But I am saying that it's a very similar problem, despite it not getting the same "wait, but how?" Thoughts
Yeah. It's not nearly as big of an issue as in languages like English, but it still comes up sometimes with trying to match the stress on syllables to the beat of a melody without making it sound awkward. Same with rhyming.
In English though the sentence structure changes for most questions
@@bobdagamer640 In most languages, there are multiple indicators of several things, such as spoken English indicating a question with both tone and word order. Removing one of these indicators can make a line feel unnatural, even if the other is still present
Was looking for a comment like this! Another interesting comparison is the way pronunciation within songs can actually different significantly from regular speech. It's only when people sing with their retained accents that this becomes noticeable. So every language will have their artistic conventions that people will get used to, and/or simply treat differently from regular speech because it's not!
A partial English equivalent to this phenomenon is how we often need to align the emphasized syllables of words the the beat of the song. I notice in a lot of Japanese music that is dubbed into English, the translators will either need to use very loose translations or just disregard this rule, leading to some funny-sounding lyrics with the em-PHA-sis in the wrong syl-LAB-le to preserve the rhythm and word order.
bro completely butchered the “Ma” sounds 😂
I was gonna say, all of those were 妈
An easy way to relativise the complexity of melody lyrics matching is to compare tonality to cadence in non-tonal languages (e.g. English). Fitting lyrics with the right cadence (i.e. the right lyrical meter) to match the melody is kinda similar in complexity to fitting tonality to melody, both are super complex when taken out of context but they’re both “natural” for song-making in those respective cultures
Thank you, I was scrolling through the comment section just to find out if somebody else noticed that too
This question has been in the back of my mind for years. Thanks for explaining.
I asked this same question many years ago to my Chinese friends and nobody could properly explain it to me. I think I get clearer answers from the comment section here, that in general Mandarin songs ignore the tones while Cantonese ones try to match the tones. But I don’t know how wise it is to learn from RUclips comment section…
It’s very wise. RUclips commenters know everything. We are never wrong.
Yes Cantonese and Vietnamese song match the tones
Mandarin songs often do not
Most Mandarin dialects folk songs and operas (such as the famous Yunnan folk songs and errenzhuan which became such memes recently) still match the tones, but modern pop music just ignore them (but most of them were just craps especially for the last 10 years.😅)
“…in general Mandarin songs ignore the tones while Cantonese ones try to match the tones. ”
I had heard something along those lines years ago and it was interesting to read comments on this video that are consistent with that. It seems like something someone somewhere would have studied-and, in any event, it would be interesting to have a video on that topic.
cool video. i've been taking voice classes in non-tonal languages (english/italian/german), and even in them we alter our vowels pretty frequently from the actual spoken ones for artistic effect.
There are also secondary qualities to the tone pronunciation, such as length, creaky voice, or stress on certain parts of the syllable, and often they're enough to tell the tones apart in a song (at least from my experience in Mandarin n Cantonese)
This really isn't as much of an issue as one might think. Tones are only one of many ways tonal languages transmit information, and information transmitted by tones is often accompanied by other information for redundancy. For example, many words in Chinese are compound words made of more than one syllable, so with additional syllables as well as logical associations of other words elsewhere in the sentence, you can still distinguish meaning without tones. I find that this concern with the ambiguity of tones is mostly a phobia for the new students who only learn and use single, simple words often made of single syllables. Once a higher degree of proficiency is achieved nobody really thinks about the tones anymore. Though that is not to say you can get away unnoticed with using the wrong tones; they can guess what you mean but any tonal mistakes will still be obvious, just like making a typo in writing.
Therefore, imagine an English line, where for artistic effect, some words are misspelt.
Evan thorough the randition is wrung, you wood still unterstand, thorough maybie with somme diffaculty.
Likewise, one would still be able to parse the lyrics of a tonal language with its tones messed up by the music.
My sister married a guy who was from Vietnam. He and his immediate family have lived in the U.S. since 1975 so of course they all speak English, but they have often hosted extended family and other friends/family from Vietnam who don’t speak English. I figured it would be a nice gesture to try to learn some Vietnamese so I could at least have a rudimentary conversation with visitors.
I’m a professional opera musician who deals with translations of operas for surtitles, so I’ve learned quite a bit of Italian, German, and French, plus the Spanish I studied throughout high school. I’m fairly adept at picking up the basics of languages.
That wasn’t the case with Vietnamese.
I understand the concept of tonal vowels, and when reading Vietnamese on a page I can understand some of it and even say a few things correctly. When spoken, though, I can’t understand anything, nor can I seem to say a whole sentence correctly.
In listening to Vietnamese music with my brother-in-law’s mother, I’ve asked her about inflection and how the tonal vowels work when sung. She had no earthly idea how to explain it. She is not a musician at all so my musical "language" made no sense to her, just as her attempts to explain the sung inflection made no sense to me. The best understanding I could get was that the music usually follows the inflection. It seems similar to Handel’s use of word-painting, just done on a universal scale rather than being tossed in haphazardly for color.
Your video here make it a bit clearer, since I would imagine it’s very difficult to always make the music match the inflection. I’m still a little confused as to how it works in practice; I’d love to hear a native Vietnamese speaker sing some examples of, explaining it as they go.
But great video! Very fascinating topic.
Clarification needed: did you ensure that *everyone* understood what you meant by "inflection"?
Pretty sure Vietamese, like Mandarin, doesn't have inflection. It's an 'analytic' language.
@@kekeke8988 maybe he meant the tones.
As many have already pointed out, dropping tones in Mandarin isn’t rare at all. Meaning comes from context. While “ma” can mean different things in different tones, each tone in itself also carries from a few to dozens of homophones which cannot be differentiated phonetically even the tone is clarified. However, unlike classical Chinese, modern Chinese isn’t a monosyllabic language. A big portion of its vocabulary consists of two-syllable and multi-syllable words. While “wo” and “ming” could mean many things, “wode”, “mingzi” almost always mean “my” and “name”.
With enough context provided, tones can be dropped completely without causing a single ambiguity. In the earlier years of Chinese sci-fi movies and children’s programs, robots and computers often spoke with a completely toneless voice, and it didn’t really cause any confusion.
This is an interesting question and a clear description -- but what I'd really like is some audio examples where we can hear a line of a song as spoken and then as sung. Maybe in an upcoming video?
I'm Thai and never think of that before. there are many accent and tones within the country some are familiar with most people and some not so singing in Thai doesn't mean that you have to have right exact tone cause it imposible cause it can shift as long as it doesnt shift too much from the standard it still can be understood completely fine because when you listen to music you listen to the whole sentence not just one word it hard to be misunderstood even few of the word ain't tone correct, the other tonal language might be the same I guess.
I have read something similar in comments: that songs are like another dialect. It even makes sense but i still have some questions. For example in ไมค์หมดหนี้ เสี่ยงโชค there are subs for songs so I thought it because it's isan language or some other but then when i tried to find different between subs and what they are singing i couldn't and that was confusing and even more confusing was when i discovered that subs are only when contestants are singing but not when guests. They are singing ลูกทุ่ง too so why?
Carabao their songs keeping tones right? Because song หนุ่มสุพรรณ wouldn’t make sense? What about Pongsit Kampee and other เพลงเพื่อชีวิต artists?
And sorry for my english and poor understanding of thai music. For example I realy would like to know difference หมอลำ and ลูกทุ่ง… or understand Kampee's songs but it's hard when i don't have cultural context and don't know the language, actually I’m not even learning thai (only watching tv shows and listening music). I think thai most beautiful language (one place higher than vietnamese because rrrr) but because orthography i have gave up learning even beafore i started and started to learn chinese becouse i thought it's easier 555. And what’s funny I sometimes understand more in thai than in chinese.
@@anxin108It’s a dialect word + dialect accent.
I imagine it's a bit like how we don't put English lyrics so they don't sound weird. Even when we talk, we don't place the wrong emPHAsis on the wrong syLLAble. So too when we sing, it sounds strange for the word "happy" to sound like "hapPEE." You know what I'm saying?
As a Spanish speaker who learned Spanish as a native tongue, listening to some traditional Peruvian/Bolivian music, it sounds strange as it sounds like the musicians wrote the music first and then put the words into it. The music sounds beautiful but some the words sound "off."
Not a native Chinese speaker, but I imagine that to a Chinese song writer, what sounds "off" comes naturally to them. I imagine that a lot of the "modern" music is translations of music written in other languages (English, Korean, Japanese, other dialects of Chinese etc.), and so the Chinese kinda has to be forced into the music, leaving it to sound "off" to Chinese ears.
As an example, BTS is very famous in Japan, but some of their songs have been translated, and the Japanese sounds weird sometimes. I speak Japanese somewhat fluently, I'm not a native, but I can hear when the Japanese is strange. Korean has final L for example, but Japanese does not, and it sounds strange in Japanese when a word is cut off.
Very interesting question, I was thinking about it recently but was clueless. Thanks man!
This is one of those questions I’ve had in my mind for years now. Thanks for the video!
As a person speaking both Mandarin and Cantonese, I want to share my ideas about **how different their songs are** despite they are neighboring languages:
In Mandarin, most artists write songs with no regard of the tones. People just sing without caring anything about the tones. As a result, it is very common to misunderstand the lyrics. Therefore, a lot of people prefer listening to music “with subtitles on”, and every Chinese music software provide synchronized lyric display, even Apple Music in China has synced lyrics!
(By the way, watching Chinese subtitles while listening to a program doesn’t interfere with each other as much as phonetic languages do. So a lot of Chinese people watch everything with subtitles.)
However, in Cantonese, songwriters pay extra attention to the tones. They make sure the melody matches the tones, and consider tonal matched lyrics of higher artistic value. Cantonese has 9 tones, thus a perfect match is usually impossible. But songwriters do challenge themselves to match as much as they can, especially focusing on keywords and words that may lead to confusion.
As someone who is native in both, that's utter BS. Tones are fully present in Mando songs. Also, they are dialects, not languages.
@@biggusballuz5405 the dialect/language distinction is more political than scientific sometimes. since mandarin and cantonese are not mutually intelligible, it's better to say they are different languages
@@biggusballuz5405language is a dialect with an army and a navy.
@@biggusballuz5405There's no way it's a dialect. Mandarin speakers cannot understand even 0.01% Cantonese
What about Mandarin or Cantonese covers of Western pop songs? The melody is already pre-written. For example, 鄧麗君 Teresa Teng singing《比翼鳥》, a Mandarin cover of "San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)", an American pop music song written by John Phillips and sung by Scott McKenzie. Or 陳百強 Danny Chan singing《粉紅色的一生》, a Cantonese cover of "La Vie en Rose".
This question has passed through my mind and i am exited for the answer
0:12 the way you pronounce the five tones sound all like the first tone😵
This is a great find! I'm going through all your videos and really loving them.
Thanks!
Theres more to tones than just pitch; there can also be shifts in sound quality ("swallowed" sounds, for example), and variation in tone duration. So it can often be possible ro still express tones through these kinds of distinctions while singing, as long as the melody doesn't interfere too severely
i've had this question for a while, and i stumbled across this video, so thanks!
Thank you so much, been wondering about this forever!
Very complex & amazing🎉
i was actually just thinking of this very dilemma the other day. great video!
Glad to hear it!
you should definitely make a video about how different arabic dialects are, why they are so, and what a diglossia is, as a native speaker it'll be very cool if you bring light to it! shokran.
Second this as a guy who speaks a few different types of arabic as a second language.
@@connormurphy683 oh my, what dialects can you speak? i am a native of the Egyptian dialect, and can speak a weird hybrid of khaleeji-levantine, and of course standard
@@faerie_cakes standard, egyptian, moroccan. not perfect, particularly in vocabulary and dialectal grammar, but I at least have pretty good accents in them
would be interested to hear what your hybrid dialect sounds like haha
@@connormurphy683 مرة مرة حلو، نحنا كعرب بنكون قادرين نفهم بعض بس منشان بنشوف أفلام لبعض و هيك يعني، يعني و أنا و صغيرة كنت أحضر يوتيوب لخلايچة و هيك و اتعلمت منهم، هاد هو تطبيق فكرة ال comprehensible input slash immersion
here ya go that's my hybrid, and i think it's alright not to perfectly speak dialects, as long as you can communicate in standard and can understand them, because then that means you're in a place to be able to pick them up if you were ever in a situation where you'd be able to, or if you just watched a ton of youtube, Arabic really is very diverse, just like Chinese, it holds so many cultures together and comes in so many shapes, it doesn't look the same for everyone
been looking forward to this vid
Very nice video, despite speaking mandarin I never thought of this before!
In my experience of Thai the only tone which is really sung is the high tone to get your horse, whereas the others are a bit more accommodating of pitch difference so I would call the Thai falling tone is an emphatic tone and the rising tone is a questioning tone as well which helps. As for singing Thai there is a distinction that all Thai poetry can be sung but there an allotted melody for a specific meter of poetry.
it's truly amazed me cause I've never thought there's this kind of difficulty when it comes to tonal languages. I guess Vietnamese song writers have been doing a pretty good job overcoming this challenge that it doesn't seem like a problem to be taken in to account at all.
I was hoping you'd go into the differences between languages that use contour tones vs languages that use register tones.
In mandarin the tones are all ignored. You can still understand mandarin w/o tones quite well
Because Mandarin is a dynamic tonal language, so it's the change of pitch within a syllable that makes the difference, whereas Cantonese is a melodic tonal language where both the dynamic change in one syllable and the pitch itself makes all the difference.
My son spoke Thai from birth but learned English at 12 (he is 20 now). He is very critical of the Thai language and gets grumpy if he has to speak it with his mom. He can't understand why Thais never invented punctuation or spaces between words and it bugs the crap out of him. He reinforced the concept that a new language fosters new thoughts ways of thinking that are somehow less likey to occur to someone who speaks only one language. I observe it in others who learn English as well.
I have that experience with my children. The older learnt English at age 5 in school, and still likes reading in English better. The younger learnt English at age 2/3, is very critical of German and hates German lyrics.
@@unapatton1978 Ich habe in einege Staten in Deutschland gewont. Deshalb kann Ich etwass sprechen. I had a German buddy in Munchen ask why all the best songs were in English but at the time I did not know what to say. Years later I learned that English has 3 times as many words as German and 6 times as many as French. With a variety of words to choose from rhyming must be easier not to mention that English can use standard word order or inverted word order (like German) and it still makes sense. Flexibility is probably the answer to his question.
Same with Hindi raps. Since it's an SOV language and lots of verb endings are same because you're talking of the present tense, a lot of Hindi rap feels dry. English rap on the other hand had the freedom to end sentences/phrases with any noun you like.
This also has the side effect that when you find a good Hindi rap that creatively handles such issues you're hella impressed!
@@liamstone3437 English is the language with the most total speakers (L1 & L2) at 1.456 billion. Standard German ranks 12th with 133 million total speakers. English replaced French in the mid-20th century as the language of diplomacy and international relations. English is recognized as the official (de jure or de facto) language in 56 countries in all continents. German ranks at number 6 with only 6 countries in Europe alone. English vocabulary consists 26% Germanic vocabulary and 29% Latin and 29% (Old) French vocabulary (58% Romance language-based vocabulary).
"ประโยคภาษาไทย" original
"ประ-โยค-ภา-ษา-ไทย" separate
"pra-yok-pa-sa-tai" English pronunciation
"Thai'slanguagesentence" feels like
"Thai's language sentence" meaning
ประโยค is sentence, ภาษา is language, ไทย is Thai.
ป-p ร-r า-a โ-o ย-y ค-k ภ-p า-a ษ-s า-a ท-t ไ-ai
I think it's the same as English, you just know where the character and vowel should get together to make a word.
English bugging me too, I need to press spacebar like every 5 keystrokes haha
Traditional Taiwanese music/opera do tend to have music follow the tones. It's not that hard actually. Pick the cord, if it's rising tone, match a 3 cord upward.
Thing is, if you comepletely ignore tones, the song itself becomes not understandable without reading lyrics.
0:13 You aren't that far off! Your first tone is pretty good. Your 3rd tone sounds close to what the 2nd tone should actually be and your 5th tone sounds like what the 4th tone should actually be (the 5th tone is kind of like an unemphasized 4th tone). Your 2nd and 4th tones are a little off - the 2nd starts low and rises and the 4th starts high and falls in pitch, so they aren't just higher/lower pitched versions of the 1st tone.
Source: Native Mandarin speaker
Oh the jokes we have in Chinese just from the mismatched lyrics and song melodies
Tonal language actually make it harder to make lyrics, since there's fewer words to choice, and using wrong tone make the song impossible to understand at first time listening.
Languages like Japanese are ones of the most easy to make, since tone isn't an important role, and each word's simple enough to make a sound, and there's alot of sounds in one sentence
Not rlly
Great video. Very interesting concept I had no idea of.
I would love if you could expand on this concept with actual music examples.... although I can see how unfeasible that might be.
I came with one curious single question in mind and now I ended up more confused after your over the top answers.
This was super interesting, thank you!
Glad you enjoyed it!
wow, thanks! i've always been wondering
This is actually an interesting concept
If you listen to Afrobeat, Yoruba lyrics completely ignore the tone.
THANK YOU, i was thinking about this
Never thought YT had an answer for this question
1:54 that exploding head drawing made me laugh so much I subscribed.
Actually, you can understand based on context. You may get confused with individual word but hearing it in the full sentence will make sense.
For example in the line “trời còn làm mưa, mưa rơi mênh mang” from Trịnh Công Sơn’s “Tuổi Đá Buồn”, the “còn” is actually a whole step above “trời”, even though both have the falling tone, which makes it sound like “con”, or child, rather than “còn”, or still. But the listener knows that the whole like is “the sky is STILL making raining” and not “the sky is CHILD making raining”. Mưa (neutral tone, no tone) also sounds like mứa (rising tone), because it’s a whole step and half step above from trời. But mứa isn’t even a word. So it’s all just context.
Kind of like how in English you’ll know if it’s read past tense or read present tense based on the context of the whole sentence.
Oh and even then, in the example I used, there were two syllables with the falling tone but one is higher. This happens, but what will NEVER happen is the next syllable is a higher tone but a lower note. Never. It can be same tone higher note, higher tone same note, but it can never go in the opposite or it will sound super awkward and unnatural, even if we can understand based in context, as my fellow Vietnamese have pointed out in the comments.
Sometimes ignoring the tones makes vagueness thats poetic.For example theres a Xhosa song Senzeni Na? Because of the none clear tones it can be interpret as either "What must we do?" Or "What have we done?".Which are both relevant in the context of it.
I brought this question up at university almost 30 years ago but nobody could answer (it was to a researcher on thai music). Glad you finally answered this and for including the sources. First link doesnt work for me though if you can repost.
Thanks for letting me know about the sources. I was having trouble getting the first link to work because a PDF. Here is the page I got it from on Google Scholar: scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C14&q=singing+tonal+language&oq= If this doesnt work then the name of the source is Singing in a tone language: Shona by M Schellenberg
@@LeafNye For Thai, Ketkaew & Pittayaporn (2014) is more innovative and quantitative
A lot would depend on the number of tones. Mandarin Chinese has 5, but many African languages have only two: high and low. (Their drum language involves two drums, one with a high and another with a low tone.) Even when an African language has 3 or 4 tones, their words usually have several syllables, so there are fewer pairs of words separated only by tone.
When you're listening to Vietnamese, the tones are very rarely dropped. But even if they were you could still make out most of the lyrics using context clues
In Myanmar, we take account the tone of the word to the lyrics and sound. Cus if we ignore the tones of the words, the song might sound a bit awkward and weird even tho we know the meaning. But basically, we only have 3 tones (eg. မ, မာ, မား) so it might a bit easier than other languages, I think.
It’s my bday today thanks for the upload mane 🎉
Happy Birthday!
In addition to the five tones, Thai also have the alive and dead syllables. Different tones will allow for some movement in pitch, but if they don't fit it will sound completely out of tune, or misinterpreted
mai jing mai jing. phom mai daiyin phasa siang wela fang phleng thai prawa bpen farang.
In classic Chinese literacy, there is a format called "Ci", which basically mean "lyrics". It comes with different "titles", so you can have multiple implementation under the same "title". Each title has a specific rule where each word has to follow some tonal rules, so each implementation, though has different words, will have similar tonal transition/progression.
So basically each title should have a music comes with it, so the same music can be sung with different lyrics( under the same/similar tonal transition/progression). Countless "Ci" were produced by poets and were sung by vocalists. But too sad, all the music from those titles are lost in time, only the lyrics remain.
Still some great Chinese/Cantonese songs still follow that similar rules so it won't feel weird to sing.
Interesting topic - would’ve been helpful to have some examples to make the point.
I remember wondering this when I was studying Chinese 5 years ago. Interesting to see a video on it now.
So it’s kind of like how you have to select the words with the right amount of syllables and rhyme to match the rhythm of the song, or if the lyrics has already been written, to write the tune that matches the built in rhythm.
I see this question as asking if a language with vowel length distraction can't be sung. I assume it works the same: the length is ignored in modern music, but traditional music trend to match the length of the words to the music, or the music to the length of the words.
Spanish might not be defined as a tonal language, but words can change meaning depending on the accent. As a simple example we can take a look at the words práctico/practico/practicó, each with the accent in each of the vowels
Práctico = Practical
Practico = I practice
Practicó He/She practiced
As the accent is very important in these words, songs are usually composed with that in mind, as not following the accents in the words can make it sound weird at best
In fact, there's this song by Enrique Iglesias and Juan Luis Guerra called "Cuando me enamoro" (accent in the first o in enamoro; "When I fall in love"), but in the actual song the melody makes it sound more like "Cuando me enamoró" ("When he/she made me fall in love with him/her")
as someone who listens to lots of chinese pop music, they don't really think about it when writing the songs I think, you kinda garner the meaning through context
What about languages and/or cultures that have developed styles of singing where singers can vocalize 2 or more notes simultaneously?
What are some of these people groups called? I'd love to research this more
@@LeafNye Search for Anna-Maria Hefele, polyphonic overtone singing. She is absolutely amazing.
@@LeafNyeThey might be referring to overtone/throat singing, most famously by Altai peoples
There's another strategy applicable to Mandarin Chinese that I'm not sure had been described here. There are often many ways (or phrases) that have similar meanings, so you just pick the one that has a tone that follows the melody the best.
Why am I watching this? I sing Chinese karaoke and already get it 😂
What are your thoughts on Provinces of Music?
the ma with an arrow down is the way i called my mom lovingly 🤧☺️
I was walking with some people at the Hồ Chí Minh mausoleum and a vietnamese friend explained that one of the songs we were hearing was written with the tones in mind. When the song said his name, the melody was So, Mi, Do. Low, High, Middle note.
Which matched the tones of his name. I asked if the music always matched the tones. And she said usually yes because of not, it's considered bad song writing.
I live in Thailand and have asked this question several times, but most people here don't seem to quite understand my question.
Keep grinding 🫡🫡
How would you follow the tone in extreme metal genres?
great video!
Looking forward to Mixtec. Mesoamerican languages are very underrated
Actually even though a syllable may have a different tone what counts for the tone to be understood is not the mean pitch but the shape of the pitch change : if the tone is gliding, falling, rising, dipping it doesn't matter from or to what height it is gliding, falling, rising or dipping.
i chose chinese as my major in the university in 2023. we have had 2-3 lessons at the moment but we started learning chinese(mandarin) with the easiest keys? and hieroglyphs. tones.. oh god yes i hear the slight difference but i really cant say them correctly or like a native(chinese sounds are interesting and im glad there's no hard R). it takes too much time for my brain to remember which tone i should use so singing with tones would be a pain for me
Sing like the singers sing, speak like the speakers speak. Hanzi, not hyroglyphs.
@@zakuro8532
You mean moon runes.
It's a pity that Mandarin songs rarely use tones (which could help learning tones), except for a few composers, like Jonathan Lee
You somehow managed to rope in the Dene-Yeniseian hypothesis in a video about singing in tonal languages. Instantly subscribed
I've read Edward Vajda groundbreaking work on this family 10 years ago
As a Cantonese speaker. Filling in the lyrics has always been hard to do, so hard in fact it is an actual separate job than the singer/composer in the music industry. But the result is beautiful.
a lot of informative comments, thank You all people speaking different languages,
dziękuję, pozdrawiam
Interesting. I've actually wondered about this for a long time.
FunFact(?): I've read that people who speak tone languages are more likely to have perfect pitch
do you got actual examples for any of this