Chinese-speaking

Chinese pop songs remixed into pounding slow-rock and car-stereo DJ edits, cheesy yet addictive.

Half-shouted, half-chanted bravado from livestream rooms: four syllables at a time, all swagger, so over-the-top it becomes addictive.

No record label and no packaging, spread through websites and ringtones to every street: Chinese viral songs of the 2000s.

Rock shouted out of hutong rehearsal rooms: raw, direct, carrying northern wind and poetry.

Horsehead fiddle, throat singing and distorted guitars gallop across the steppe; metal can carry wind and hoofbeats.

Dialects, local pride and internet memes enter rap, from underground cyphers to variety-show stages.

Turns private feelings into everyday songs that many people can sing.

Melodies shaped by nine tones, singing joys and sorrows under Hong Kong's neon.

Hokkien's soft tones, nakasi and enka-like singing, songs of harbours, leaving home and human warmth.

Brings classical Chinese imagery into contemporary melody, tying characters' fates to their feelings.

Guzheng, dizi and opera-style vocals meet electronic drums and drops: gufeng melodies sped up and bass-boosted into danceable C-style EDM.

Lanterns, paper charms and a night parade of spirits: guofeng melody telling tales of ghosts, karma and the human heart.

Peking and Kunqu opera vocals brought into pop; one line of opera singing lifts the chorus.

Guzheng, erhu, pipa and dizi in the lead, Chinese instrumental music from landscape painting to modern arrangement.

Bright, round, crisply enunciated high notes between folk song and bel canto: the most familiar Chinese sound of gala stages.

Horsehead fiddle, long song and northwest high singing, songs for vast grasslands and the loess plateau.

Long-song melodies of the grasslands over a four-on-the-floor beat: high, wide open, all blue sky and galloping horses.

One guitar singing of cities, youth and faraway places, making ordinary days worth a song.