I would like to know how greatly the structure of a language changes the music of that culture.
For example, how different is a love song in German when it is put against a French german love song?
Or how different is German punk from French punk (There is such a thing, right?)
How do Chinese tones affect the structure of a Chinese song’s melody?
Answer: It depends. Mandarin songs tend to have melodies independent of the tones of the lyrics. Does this make the lyrics hard to understand? Heck yes!
Cantonese songs tend to have melodies that follow the tonal contours of the lyrics. So, for example, a syllable with a low tone will be scored with a note that is lower in pitch than the preceding note.
It’s a really hard question to answer precisely. Very often, almost always, songs don’t translate very well. Say you start with a great song in one language, you might then end up with a crappy song after translation, or a good but surprisingly different song.
Examples of this are French chanson that have been translated into English. In the case of say, Brel’s La quête (The Impossible Dream), or Aznavour’s Hier encore (Yesterday When I Was Young)*, the English versions are quite good but sound completely different despite similar arrangements.
The phonetics of the language of course play an important role, but I think that cultural context colours our perception of music much more than it would seem.
The liner notes to a Chieftains album told how they learned one old Irish folksong: it was sung by a farm woman in a remote part of Ireland. She knew it with both Gaelic and English lyrics.
She said she preferred to sing it in Gaelic, because “the tune and the English words are like a quarreling man and wife.”
The best answer to this is: It depends. A lot of times someone translating a song with the intention of singing it in another language has to decide between choppy, unpoetic lyrics, or changing the words around to make it a bit more aurally pleasing.