tonal languages are pretty intense looking to a tone deaf fella like me ?!!

Tones also play a role in other languages, but in a peripheral sense. If I look at you while you're eating and say "You're going to finish that." with a rising tone on each successive word, you're probably going to interpret that as a question even though the structure of the sentence is declarative. Standard Norwegian has a system of tones that, while they do not contribute to the meaning of what is said, define linguistic status in the same way that some accents in English are considered more acceptable than others - in the early days of US broadcasting, for example, most news anchors were from the midwest because the midwest accent was thought least offensive to most of the rest of the country.

Afterthought: my problem with tonal languages is not that I'm tone-deaf and can't hear them (I can), but my voice is so bad that I can't speak them. I have the opposite problem with aspirated consonants - I can speak them but I cand distinguish them when I hear them.