I have three questions, actually, all sort of related.
Is it the case that a monotone voice is evidence that a person cannot carry a tune, whereas a good singer speaks in a very animated voice? I first noticed this some time ago and my observations of people I think have borne it out, but I wonder whether other people might know about studies or hard data. It could be coincidences, I suppose.
Do people who speak in tonal languages recognize some speakers as having more beautiful speaking voices than others in part because of their melodic tones? Also, if a person is tone deaf, is he hard to understand?
Are the melodies of songs sung in tonal languages constrained by the tonality of the words themselves, or are there ways around that? If, for example, there is a “ma” sound that goes low-high-low, is it possible to do that as a modulation on one long note?
FWIW, a friend of mine was told that he had a really good voice, by someone who had never heard him sing. I believe they were later surprised to find that he’s not a very good singer. I think with some training, though, he would sound good.
I have listened to quite a bit of Chinese pop music.
The tones don’t go away. They can have a gracenote-like effect on the notes. Also, sometimes the singing can be quite fast, so that a person is singing several words within one note. The tones can be muted, depending on the demands of the melody. It seems that some singers put the tones in there more strongly that others.
Tones can vary within a melody just as they can vary within the greater tonal structure (i.e., tone of voice) of a sentence or group of sentences.
Also, keep in mind that, even when the tones in Chinese are somewhat distorted or muted, the words do not become unintelligible. Words tend to come in pairs, and there are many other keys to meaning besides the tones.
Do you mean if a speaker of a tonal language is tone deaf? Because I suspect that it doesn’t happen very often. I’ve seen studies showing that native speakers of Mandarin and Vietnamese are extremely consistent in the tones they use, and there’s suggestion that they may be far more likely to have perfect pitch. They’re constantly trained when young, you know.
If someone truly was tone deaf, though, it might not make too much differences. Languages with contour tones (like the Chinese languages, and I believe Thai and Vietnamese as well) probably wouldn’t have too much trouble. In Mandarin, for instance (the only tonal language I know) there are four tones, and each one has a shape that would compensate if the pitches were screwy. High-level, rising, falling, and falling-rising, so that as long as you start out high and end up lower, it’ll be perceived as a fourth tone word. However, as I mentioned above, the tones are pretty precise, so it could give your speech an unnatural quality. Note that this paragraph is a complete WAG, by the way.
There are also languages with register tones, where a syllable is high or low, no increase or decrease in pitch. But they usually only have two or three tones, so I doubt there’s a problem there.
It depends. I read a paper a while back about the influence of melody on tone. It’s pretty fascinating, actually, and easy to read. The author studied Mandarin and Cantonese by comparing lines in songs with the same melody and exploring whether the tones of corresponding syllables matched. In Mandopop, Mandarin-language pop music, there was no particular influence, while in Cantopop, there was. This is consistent with the fact that Cantonese has more tones than Mandarin, and the tone system is probably a little more central to the language.
I don’t know if other forms of music would follow these principles, however, and I don’t know how heavily it’s been studied. Traditional Chinese poetry has rules regarding tone, so it might be that traditional music or more “classy” musical styles require more attention to it.
That monotone voice can also be the sign of clinical depression and a host of other psychological disorders, as well as someone who just doesn’t speak very dynamically.