Chinese music and tones

[Alchemist]

I started to listen to Chinese music some weeks ago. One thing I noticed at once is that tones are hardly ever pronounced correctly in Chinese songs.

A few days ago I decided to talk about this with a Chinese friend of mine. This fact seemed so obvious to me, that I was sure this was a well-known fact even among Chinese people. So I went like: "I noticed that words in Chinese songs are pronounced very differently than in normal speech. Tones are often all scrambled up. Doesn't that make understanding Chinese songs difficult to you too?"

Well, to my greatest astonishment, he totally denied this. He said they have no problem understanding Chinese songs, because words are pronounced *exactly* like in normal speech. According to him, tones are all in their right place. He's a well-educated guy (he has a university degree), so I don't think he spoke out of ignorance.

So, the question is... am I tone-deaf or what?!

P.S.

I *can* hear tones in normal speech! :-)

[Claw]

We had a thread on this before:

http://www.chinese-forums.com/viewtopic.php?t=2032

Here's an interesting link someone posted on that thread:

http://people.cohums.ohio-state.edu/chan9/articles/bls13.htm

The link begins as follows:

"In the study of tonal phenomena' date=' a curious linguist might wonder what happens to the tones in a language when the words are put to music and sung. For Chinese, modern songs in Mandarin and Cantonese exhibit very different behaviour with respect to the extent to which the melodies affect the lexical tones. In modern Mandarin songs, the melodies dominate, so that the original tones on the lyrics seem to be completely ignored. In Cantonese songs, however, the melodies typically take the lexical tones into consideration and attempt to preserve their pitch contours and relative pitch heights."[/quote']