I already have a hard time distinguishing tones in normal speech. This gets significantly worse when I listen to Chinese songs, since the melody masks tones even further.
Yes, I understand that context will help distinguish words from one another. But almost always I have to look up the lyrics to know exactly what they are singing about.
Can native Chinese speakers tell tones apart in songs? How can I improve my tone-listening skills (in music)?
No.
In songs, most tones disappear. The syllables are sung along the melody of music. We only tell the tone because we can catch what the whole word or sentence is.
In songs, usually the melody should be written to convey the tones of syllables (or syllables chosen to match the melody). Mismatch of melody and lyrics can result in misunderstandings. However, in pop music, not much attention has been paid to this problem.
An interesting paper (that this blog post pointed me to) claims that in Cantonese pop songs, the melody more closely follows the tones, while in Mandarin songs, the tones just get obliterated.
Not sure if listening skill to tones in Chinese songs has its own implication, I get the impression that songs are generally harder than daily conversations for a non-native language.
To answer the first part of your question: native speaker can not tell the lyrics all the time. One particularly interesting case is the songs by Jay Chou, who is one of the most famous Chinese singers since 2000. As a native speaker, I can only get about 10%-30% of the lyrics by only listening to his rap songs.
However, tones seem not to be problem, rather, it is the speed that makes the difficulty for native speakers. Personally, I do not really find tones as the problem. Perhaps only when listen to special dialects, nonstandard tones may be problematic.
To improve, the suggestion could be similar as what you thought. Start with easier ones and try to understand in the context. This process should be very similar to or same as general listening skill.
Listen to a slow melodious song like 月亮代表我的心 and you should be able to pick out the tones reasonably well as the background music is quite soft and the words are spoken clearly.
(I'm not a native speaker of Chinese, but an avid musicologist and student of Chinese.)
I've heard at least some Chinese pop music where the tones are certainly not obliterated, though I think it's reasonable to suppose this happens at least some of the time.
My speculation however is that in general something more interesting and complicated happens much of the time: which is that the tonal framework gets modulated and transposed onto the relevant key in the music at the time of performance.
If the key changes or modulates during the piece, the tonal frame modulates along with it.
The vocalist also has the option to alter the tonal framework's position in the key as the melody progresses. The tonal framework will function fine as long as the tones are performed in a way which is internally consistent-- ie relative to the other tones performed in the same temporal context.
This may seem to be overly analytic, but I think it's just scratching the surface of the complexities in this topic... world of wonders.
Native speakers can get tones in song by deducing without even realizing, but not by listening - the tones are obliterated as fefe's answer suggested.
I am a singer and raised bilingual speaking English and Cantonese. The simple answer would be yes, native speakers would be able to hear tone differences in songs if they listen closely, but how well this can be done will very much depend on quality of the song, namely on how well integrated are the tones between every Chinese spoken lyric to its paired pitch of the melody. Chinese songs, due to the tonal nature of its spoken words, are the one significant issue–which makes them more difficult to write due to the nature of song–and must be written well in order for the lyrics not clash with the melody, thereby making what is sung harder to understand. Singing in Chinese, there is only limited inflections a singer could do to improve the clarity of lyrics in a poorly written song since singing naturally must take over most of the tonal responsibilities in producing resulted sound at the end. The one other thing which Chinese singing would perhaps differ from western singing is that Chinese singing tends to go into its diphthongs earlier when holding a note. Because most Chinese words have diphthong inflections at the end, this does improve diction but sometimes at the expense of fuller tone production, and to choose how far one takes this one way or the other will heavily depend on the technical progression of music and lyrics in each phrase sung at the time.
