setting text to music in chinese?

I've wondered the same thing.

But it seems that the up accents, the down accents, the down-and-up accents, and the straight across accents are disregarded for the pitches.

It has a great effect on how the singer is going to interpret it.

For example, in Mandarin Chinese you can have:

Ma (flat pitch) = Mother

Ma (swooped pitch) = horse

Ma (rising pitch) = The word at the end of a statement to turn it into a question.

So when you write, you want to consider that the singer needs to gliss or bend most the notes to make the word sound properly. As if most notes he/she sings need a grace note on it or a "swoosh" when sung. And the grace note will have to be upward or downward based on the word.

As you can imagine, this makes patter songs almost impossible.

It will of course make the words shorter. In case you didn't already know, chinese uses characters, so house would take up about 1/3 the room as the actual word house in English. Italian is official musical words, so fortissimo, for example, would be a really tiny amount of space.

Best regards.