Singing in tone languages: Phonetic and structural effects

Let’s begin with the question that ultimately motivates this research. Singing in tone languages seems to make contradictory demands on voice pitch. On the one hand, in any language, a song is an arrangement of pitches (‘notes’) based on musical considerations (melody, harmony, verse structure, etc.). On the other hand, in a tone language, song texts (‘words’ or ‘lyrics’) include pitch specifications that are purely linguistic (lexical and/or grammatical). Modifications to the linguistically specified pitch may change the meaning of the words. So this leads to an obvious question: How does the use of voice pitch for musical purposes coexist with the use of voice pitch for phonological purposes in a tone language? Much more straightforwardly, we might want to phrase the question as it was expressed in the title of an influential article by Wong and Diehl (2002): How can the lyrics of a song in a tone language be understood? These questions are the starting point for everything I’m going to say today.