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The same class of people who created China's traditional painting and played the qin also wrote the surviving poetry. Thus, it is not surprising that the qin is the music instrument most often mentioned in Chinese poetry. Many such poems have been translated, but this is somewhat obscured by the fact that there has been no consistency about whether to translate qin as zither (which is the most correct, though there are also other Chinese zithers), harp, lyre, lute or something else.
Performances including poetry and song take material from the section Qin Poetry and Song. I can sing a some of melodies as I play; others would require a separate singer.
From my experience, qin songs today are often sung by a professional using a heroic quality (since the qin is "great music") that I find quite inappropriate. I found the result much more satisfactory once when I was accompanied (informally) by a singer trained in early Western music.
From my imagination of the traditional aesthetic, the singer would sound either like a scholar with a skilled and expressive voice, but one apparently untrained; like a refined singer in the style of the traditional opera form kunqu; or somewhere in between.
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