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Do Music and Language Obey the Same Rules?
Emre Sevinc writes "Ever felt as though a piece of music is speaking to you? You could be right: musical notes are strung together in the same patterns as words in a piece of literature, according to an Argentinian physicist. This article in Nature states that Damián H. Zanette's analysis also reveals a key difference between tonal compositions, which are written in a particular key, and atonal ones, which are not. This sheds light on why many people find it so hard to make sense of atonal works. In both written text and speech, the frequency with which different words are used follows a striking pattern. In the 1930s, American social scientist George Kingsley Zipf discovered that if he ranked words in literary texts according to the number of times they appeared, a word's rank was roughly proportional to the inverse of the its frequency squared. Herbert Simon later offered an explanation for this mathematical relationship. He argued that as a text progresses, it creates a meaningful context within which words that have been used already are more likely to appear than other, random words. For example, it is more likely that the rest of this article will contain the word 'music' than the word 'sausage'. Physicist Damian Zanette of the Balseiro Institute in Bariloche, Argentina, used this idea to test whether different types of music create a semantic context in a similar fashion."
I'd hate to know what disco is saying to me!
Sausage.
(It had to be said.)
I don't know about you guys, but sometimes I feel a piece of music really sausages to me.
-fren
If motives of five to eight notes are regarded as "words", then why do judges let composers enforce copyrights on individual "words"? And how can anyone know whether a particular "word" is already taken?
Oh, and sausage :-)
...and all it is saying to me is that cutting my own ears off could be blessed relief.
Beep beep.
Not that I've noticed, and I have never connected with music in any manner other than perhaps some clever or funny lyrics.
Sometimes it's a bit like the geek in me that can be happy without social contact with other people; it's just as 'different' to most of the rest of the world that I really don't like music all that much. It actually stresses me to listen to more than a few minutes worth.
I gather the more musically attuned (pun completely intended) will probably click more with this story.
I don't know if I trust these results. Music speaks to people, but almost entirely through the performance. It is the nuance and the timing that the performer put into it that make it speak, the notes on the page are almost secondary as far as expression goes. After all, when was the last time you were moved by sheet music? Or even midi, for that matter.
I shudder to think what kind of conversation is analagous to old Bill Shatner's musical attempts.
Making the moon less necessary since 1998.
I see how music could have some content in the way of emotion, and I guess that would count as a semantic composition, but whether individual phrases can translate to words, I'm not so sure about. Perhaps it has more to do with some sort of innate appeal to aesthetics, and as we listen to and formulate speech, it starts to conform to some aesthetic pattern. This isn't too far out. Some languages are considered more beautiful than others.
Music is Language.
Language is Music.
Anyone who says otherwise is just singing out of tune.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
It's because your favorite musician is probably using this effect.
Especially if your favorite musician is this guy.
Until Slashdot fixes the funny modifier, use insightful or interesting. The poster knows your intentions.
For example, it is more likely that the rest of this article will contain the word 'music' than the word 'sausage'.
Wrap your brain around that one, Ashcroft.
Literalism isn't a form of humor, it's you being irritating.
Many musicians already know this. Have you ever heard a soloist described as "lyrical"? (grep for "lyrical")
Have you ever heard a musician compare improvising a solo to "telling a story"(grep for "telling a story")
Ever heard a short musical idea described as a "phrase"?
Listening to a good jazz solo is a lot like listening to a conversation: There are main points, and there are variations on that point. It should be grounded but not to repetative
What is the soloist doing when he attempts to "build"? Actually the ideal process hardly ever takes place--that is, it is hardly ever the case that a conscientious soloist plays a thinking solo for a hard-listening hearer--but when this does happen, the key process is memory. The soloist has to establish for the listener what the important POINT, the motif if you like, is, and then show as much as he can of what it is that he sees in that motif, extending the relationships of it to the basic while never giving the feeling that he has forgotten it. In other words, I believe that it should be a basic principle to use repetition, rather than variety--but not too much. The listener is constatnly making predictions; actual infinitesimal predictions as to whether the next event will be a repetition of something, or something different. The player is constantly either confimring or denying these predictions in the listener's mind. As nearly as we can tell (Kraehenbuehl at Yale and I), the listener must come out right about 50% of the time--if he is too successful in predicting, he will be bored; if he is too unsuccessful, he will give up and call the music "disoganized."
Thus if the player starts a repetitive pattern, the listener's attention drops away as soon as he has successfully predicted that it is going to continue. Then, if the thing keeps going, the attention curve comes back up, and the listener becomes interested in just how long the pattern is going to continue. Similarly, if the player never repeats anything, no matter how tremendous an imagnation he has, the listener will decide that the game is not worth playing, that he is not going to be able to make any predections right, and also stops litening. Too much difference is sameness: boring. Too much sameness is boring--but also different once in a while.
-Richmond Browne
WARNING: If accidentally read, induce vomiting.
... and the crowd goes wild ...
*APPLAUSE* *HOLLER* *APPLAUSE* *CHEER* *WÜRSTCHEN* *APPLAUSE*
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
When a sausage is especially tasteful we say in German: "This sausage tastes like symphony. Which proves the author's point that music is like sausage and language is also somehow related.
A Wiener stands for classical music
A Thüringer is Volksmusik or Country
A Frankfurter signifies Techno music
A white sausage is Chill-out music
etc. etc.
according to an Argentinian physicist.
To anyone who ever hearded the Argentinian Spanish may be an obvious conclusion.
"I'd hate to know what disco is saying to me!"
Buy a pair of polyester bell-bottom pants, and wear lots of jewelry.
So magic really isn't some transcendental hokus-pokus, it's really a description of the abilities of those who have studied and mastered the art of predicting the next set of actions based upon previous vocal intonations.
+++ATHZ 99:5:80
This looks suspiciously like the only similarity is the fact that language and music happen in easily recognizable patterns. While this is brain food for questions like 'what is a pattern' or 'what is context', it has nothing special to do with language and music. The research could have pulled practically any 2 forulaic (grammar) based items and pointed out the same similarities. They're just not that exciting of similarities, much less some kind of precursor to communicative convergence.
This doesn't mean that music can't communicate to us in recognizable patterns, simply that those patterns don't necessarily have much to do with language, if anything.
Jimbo: Man, that guy's guitar is talking.
Otto: Hey, my shoes are talking too!
Left Shoe: Don't worry. We won't hurt you.
Right Shoe: We only want to have some fun.
Seems simple enough - when talking about a subject, you tend to stay on topic and repeat key elements throughout your speech.
Classical music in particular has built a lot on themes and theme variations. The composer invents a pattern, then implements it throughout his/her piece. Even in music school we've learned of ABA or ABACA structures in music, and I can't think of a pop tune that doesn't have a chorus section in it.
Now, if semantics can be succesfully applied to music, I'll be impressed. There already exist a set of rules for moving the base note of a chord around. Bad translation would be "General bass"
People recognize patterned sound frequencies as language?
Duuh.
All kinds of nonrandom data follows the Zipf distribution, not just written texts. But the relationship between music and language is interesting nonetheless, especially when you consider the psychological aspects, for instance language learning versus music learning.
I appreciate the mathematical analysis of music, but it's important to note that Western music originated out of liturgical chanting (Organum) and folk music. Since the composers of both were generally writing to texts, they naturally placed musical phrase-endings (cadences) at the end of phrases. Therefore, music naturally followed our preconceived ideas of language. Furthermore, since musical understanding is primarily a learned phenomena (compare South-East Asian music with Western; both cultures appreciate their own music first but can learn the other's), it is natural that our learned conception of melody would continue in its textual beginnnings simply through continual, generational reinforcement of the format of melodic conception.
So, given my experiences downtown, "f***" has a frequency of what, 0.0001?
Sheesh, I'd swear people down there are capable of holding complete and intricate conversations using solely that word.
It must be the most musical word of all.
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
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For dogs!
I've been listening to my music talk to me since I figured out how to play vinyl backwards.
Of course, mentioning sausage in that text completely bust their theory. It's like saying to someone: "Don't think of a black cat." The first thing you do is think of one. One of the ideas in NLP (neuro linguistic programming) is that the brain doesn't take account of negatives in speech.
"I'm not trying to suggest that you want to give me all your money." "I don't doubt that you can do it."
Get your own free personal location tracker
Is beautiful to find a link between music and speech, some ideas from my own work:
1-Human language seems to have a strong 'predictive' behavior, at any level (phoneme, word, and even sentence), given a broad enough recent past we can 'predict' a short enough near 'future'.
2-'Context creation' in the article, seems closely related to the time information coding of adaptative systems, very much as observed in recent neuronal synapse simulations.
3-The same way that humans are born with same vocal characteristics across races and cultures, but quickly adapt (few months) to mother's language pitch and tone, they seems to adapt to appreciate diferent tonal/rithm music qualities.
What's in a sig?
of cource music does talk. you just have to play your electric guitar with a talkbox
Conservatism: The fear that somewhere, somehow, someone you think is your inferior is being treated as your equal.
I find it interesting - and misguided that the author of the study selected individual notes as the smallest unit of musical meaning. For me, at least, a single note, just considered as a note has no meaning. For me the smallest unit of musical meaning is an interval, two notes played in succession. Of course, a musician can add meaning by varying the timbre and dynamic.
the article came right up, but the other articles linked on the page load like powdered lead.
Is this what happens when you use bittorent?
(And as long as we are analyzing patterns, has anyone tried to analyze hit patterns for semantic content?)
Total agreement that musicians already know that music is indeed a language.
When we were learning about cadences in music theory, my teacher likened them to punctuation. Half cadences are like commas, often predictably placed and leaving the need for resolution of an idea. Deceptive cadences are often like semicolons; you think the idea is going to end and then it catches you off-guard and keeps going (unless the piece/movement is simply ending in minor after being in major, but hush, you.) Plagal and authentic cadences are like periods because they give a feeling of resolution to the music ending on the tonic (I) chord. And finally, perfect authentic cadences are like exclamation points because they have extra power behind their resolution.
Of course, the fact that phrases have a rythmic rise and fall is quite accurate. That music can tell a story... very true. Where do you think musical pieces like Romeo and Juliet or the Legend of Alcobaca come from?
"I hate quotations." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Sheesh, I'd swear people down there are capable of holding complete and intricate conversations using solely that word
and you'd be right!
uses of the word
This is pretty trivial. Zipf's Law is regarded in linguistics as a curiosity rather than a deep result. It doesn't really explain anything interesting about language. Music and language are both more and less similar than both following Zipf's Law suggests. On the one hand, as a previous poster has pointed out, language is meaningful. Music may have an emotional impact, but it isn't meaningful in the sense in which language is. On the other hand, there are deeper similarities in the formal structure, pointed out by Fred Lerdahl and Ray Jackendoff in their 1983 book A Generative Theory of Tonal Music.
Learning music at the age when the mind is open to acquiring language skills seems to make a difference. The same part of the brain processes both. I read once that people who learn music at an early age tend to have more connections between the right/left brain.
:
...
... and the fact that it works emotionally is remarkable when you understand how entirely artificial it is.
In my opinion, music has taught me way more about programming than the other way around. (and music is more difficult to do effectively -- it's all real-time -- even though the pay is much better for programming)
As a piano player for 37 years now, I always get a kick out of when I can play stuff that's just notes, and it makes people laugh. It's all about expectation and fulfillment.
Partly, my ability to do so springs from my experience playing musical underscore for melodrama shows (e.g. the Gaslighter theatre in Campbell back in the '80's), which is a lot of fun -- translating dramatic dialog into musical themes.
The funny thing is how artificial the harmonic language we think of as natural is. The urge our ears feel to resolve along the cycle of 5ths evolved over centuries, and only seems natural because we grew up hearing music that spoke in it.
Nominally, it's based on the overtone series, but the actual scale we use is based on exponents of the twelfth root of two. A chromatic scale is defined mathematically as the frequencies:
F * 2^(1/12); F * 2^(2/12); F * 2^(3/12)...
Whereas the overtones are simply multiples
F 2F 3F 4F
One is rational integers, the other irrational exponents.
And when you look at how neatly the key signatures and the cycle of 5ths fit together, it's quite amazing
I heard once (from my analytic geometry teacher) that Chopin objected to people's emotional reaction to some of his pieces. The semantic world that he lived in, of advanced harmonic modulation, didn't entirely connect with the emotional content he was conveying.
isn't this a bit like normalising distributions to the gaussian distribution or something? afterall, natural human communication always involves the creation of context so that by communicating with a known nomenclature the idea gets across? if we can get the same results by studying function calls during runtime, should it mean anything?
hmm... am i making sense?
Don't forget the rather rare Phrygian cadence (V-III) which signals revelation or an epiphany of sorts.
So much meaning can be hidden in the tiny details of a simple chord resolution.
I wonder if the ideas and "rules" in this relating to word frequency could be used to make batter spam filters?
Hmmmm. Maybe I should be asking which spam filters use these ideas, instead of could they. Would be interesting to have emails converted to music and identify spam by it's sound.
BTW, check out "Peep" for a network administration tool that uses this idea.
Mike Scanlon
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Apparently, the probability of the word 'sausage' appearing was still pretty good.
Whatever it is I'm complaining about, I'm sure the Republicans did it. This is
my thought is that in 2nd grade, the teacher told us to make a topic sentance, and then for the rest of the paragraph, DESCRIBE THAT SENTANCE, not some other completely random and arbitrary idea. so, is it mathamatical, or the opression of the 2nd grade teacher?
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Linking music and language is hardly a new idea. The language analogy has been the focus of much of the research on music cognition in cognitive science in general. For one of the most direct examples of such a paradigm, look at Lerdahl & Jackendoff's generative grammar for Western tonal music, which sought to apply Chomskyan linguistic theory (hotly debated itself) to musical structures. While the syntax can be dealt with rather easily, pinning down a concept of "musical semantics" has been rather elusive. And to think Chomsky said, "If you take care of the syntax, the semantics takes care of itself." Not only is this not the case in music, a lot of people don't think it's the case in language anymore either. Ok this is the best I can think of for 3 AM. Maybe I'll try again later.
Here's what it says:
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.
All wo rk and no play makes Jack a dull boy.
All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.
Why is it that nowadays that when people submit stories to Slashdot, instead of properly summarizing a story, the submitter rather copies and pastes the story's content and maybe adds a few links. I find this similar to how some student write (er rather, plagerize) reports in college.
Anyways, the study basically reveals what any musician would know, namely, that notes within a musical key are more likely to appear in a work than the notes that fall outside a key. Songs tend to modulate through different keys but fall back to the main key, explaining why those notes are more likely to show up. I don't find this suprising one bit.
--- At my sig, unleash hell.
For the ancient Greeks, music and language were inseparable. 'Mousike' meant choral songs, solo songs with or without instrumentation, and poetic recitations. They did have instrumental music - on stringed and reed instruments mostly - but that wasn't in the same class.
'Mousike' was the art of the 'mousai', Muses. 'Mousa' could be a common noun as well as a goddess, meaning "metrical speech". The word is a derivative of 'mna-', "to remember out loud" - same root as "mental" and "memory", which we get from Latin cognates.
You find a similar thing in Vedic Sanskrit. 'Sangita' means "song-and-movement"; it might include instrumental accompaniment, but purely instrumental music was something altogether. Many Greek musical terms also implicitly include the element of dance: Classical Greeks would have found a 'khoros', "chorus" that didn't move to be a contradiction in terms.
In addition to Zanette's work on music and language, there's also some interesting work being done on language and movement (e.g. George Lakoff). Hooking all of these together and getting a picture of how music, cognition and motor function work together is going to be very interesting.
Google confirms: Ruby is the world's most beloved programm
I don't think it's necessary to respect all genres of music if one understands things about music.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
The old ethnomusicologist in me is tempted to dismiss this as a poorly designed study -- jazz and classical music alone does not make for a representative sample, and people in different parts of the world like all kinds of music that other people find unpalatable. Furthermore, you can't apply his method directly to West African drumming, which is a very popular and exciting music, but you could to the cultural crime that is Britney Spears. ;-)
.5x would come next (octaves), followed by 3x/2 (the dominant) and 4x / 3 (subdominant)... until you get to that nasty tritone.
But looking over the linked study, it's actually quite an elegant look at European and American music. It's neat that the frequency of frequencies (har har) in song parallels the frequency of words in novels. That doesn't mean that "Zipf music" inherently speaks to its listeners, just that people are attracted to this kind of basic math in the world. It's like finding a Golden Ratio -- pretty frickin' cool.
I wish I could see which notes were which on the diagrams. My suspicion is that the relative uses of each note corresponds to the mathematical relationship of the frequency to the tonic. So if x is the tonic, 2x /
Atonal music intentionally avoids emphasizing the mathematically strong relationships, liberating the composer from maintaining that pesky context to a tonic. So it makes sense that Zipf's law won't apply. But before we conclude that people dislike atonal music because it deviates from Zipf, we must answer whether we might also dislike it because we have been indoctrinated into tonality at an early age. And that's where cross-cultural studies are most valuable.
Why did I leave academia to work on websites? This stuff is fun!
rouftop
QAExpress: Solid bug tracking for you. Graphs and reports for your PHB.
http://www.harrypartch.com/aboutpartch.htm Harry Partch wrote his own musical language and built the instruments to play his compositions.
The light at the end of the tunnel is a train.
What if remembering is just a form of tunning?
What's in a sig?
There's been some interesting work in cognitive linguistics on linking grammatical categories with neurophysiological structures: for example verb aspect and motor function. I'd imagine we'll discover that the semantics of music is physiological at root, which would have the nice side effect of proving Nietzsche right yet again.
Google confirms: Ruby is the world's most beloved programm
I'll have to check it out further later, but at the moment I can't handle all that functionalism.
I swear they're breeding me to be a total connectionist around here.
I'm surprised there is no mention of fractal mathematics in all this. Back in the 80s there was a big article in Scientific American trying to explain why music sounds good. Music doesn't sound like anything in nature. Individual notes might, but melodies don't. So what does it sound like? Popular music, whether classical, jazz, rock or whatever, tends to have a fractal mathematical property. It's in the middle between brown noise, in which each sound is highly dependent on the preceding sound, and white noise, in which there is no relationship. This pattern seems to mimic something about the way we perceive changes in the world around us. If you take two radar scans of an organic landscape -- trees waving, people walking around -- and subtract one from the other, the difference is fractal. If you measure nerve activity with electrical probes you will get white noise on the peripheral nerves, but the closer you get to the central nervous system the more fractal the signal becomes, as if our nervous systems filter out random noise and let the fractal component of our perceptions pass through. Patterns in music might mimic the patterns used by our brains store memories and emotions. This would explain why a piece of music can make you feel a certain way.
Indeed interesting. but like any old geek, I tell you its how you say it, not what you say that matters. Anyone (well, almost) can learn how to play the violin, few know how to play it well.
This applies to the tone and tact of speaking as well, cheerfully saying "you suck" means something very different that saying the same in a (actually, not ironic) serious tone.
Boo, I'm talking to you.
If you like, skip it and (re-)read The Birth of Tragedy. Same idea, better stated. ;)
Google confirms: Ruby is the world's most beloved programm
Words convey meaning, sometimes through context.
Muscial notes do not convey meaning, they possibly convey feeling.
Two massively different things.
Would you believe a linguist speaking on highly complex physics problems? no.
Then why is ANY credence being given to physicist speaking on linguistics.
It's a load of shit.
Semiotics and musical composition may be processed in the same area of the brain, but it doesn't mean they have that many similarities. I process all sorts on things in my CPU, it doesn't mean they are exactly the same.
Speaking as someone who studies language at a very high level I have to say this is the biggest crock of shit I have ever heard of. These guys are so far behind the times they are already rotting in their graves. SEMIOTICS, the study of language gives rise to STRUCTURALISM the attempt to use "mathematical" formulas to discover things about human beings which runs into POST-STRUCTURALISM (related POSTMODERNISM) which questions the validity of attributing a singular truth/interpretation to a piece of work. I.e. the reason the vast majority of slashdot users will not listen to german polka music is not because it is not "perfect" in it's mathmatical construction.... but because CULTURALLY we don't like no stinking POLKA MUSIC. So there are MASSIVE factors influencing these quantitative generalisations. Furthermore we are not shown by the article ANYTHING about how audiences recieve these various literary works or musical samples. I am sure there are many people here who would prefer to watch Futurama than a production of shakespeares Hamelet. Futurama with it's intertextual references and hap-hazard manner might not score as highly (be "atonal" as this quacks put it) as shakespeare's literary "materpieces" but somehow we like it more. This is due to qualitative cultural reasons, making thier universalising INVALID. There is not universal "beautiful" - I think the mona lisa looks pretty crap frankly and prefer half the wallpapers on kde-look or gnome-look to it. Why? How could that be, it exhibits the "perfect" most attractive angles according to research done by scientists.
Again, it's quantitative shit. I am not saying that all quantitative research is bunk, I am just saying if it isn't theoretically informed re: society and culture. It invariably fails. So when some argentinian physicist pulls a rabbit out of his ass in my field of research, I expect extraordinary claims to be backed with extraordinary evidence. These people haven't even reformed inside sociology let alone dealt with the problems of poststructuralism.
These guys to linguistics are equivilent to those quack humanities people who just make up environmental data to suit their own ends. And we all know how much slashdot loves them. Please treat these guys in the same manner.
Just because literary works tend to STAY on the topic they started with. And music tends to be repeat itself and use the same notes does not point to some fundemental structure of language and music that are akin that takes precedence over the actual meaning of a work.
I admit the liberal arts departments are "slack" in comparison to of the computer science etc. But we haven't nothing for the last 200 years. For these guys to just ignore all the research relating to linguistics, semiotics, structuralism and philosophy of language is just a fucking crock and the sooner we see fewer physicists claiming to have insights into the operation of culture and meaning.... the fucking better.
it creates a meaningful context within which words that have been used already are more likely to appear than other, random words.
also reveals a key difference between tonal compositions, which are written in a particular key
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
... hamburgers is ok, then?
"...we must answer whether we might also dislike it because we have been indoctrinated into tonality at an early age."
let me save the royal 'us' the trouble: no, you're thinking too hard.
people get into tonal music for the same reason that journalists use top-down writing style - it's easier to comprehend. it's not about indoctrination; it's about what is easier for our brains to chew on. if a writer presents his thesis and then elaborates on it, referencing it throughout the work, then it's easier for the reader to understand; if a musical composition is performed in a recognizable (to the ear, not necessarily the mind) key, and the main elements of the song are presented and referenced throughout, it's easier for us to recognize and tap our toes to it, because we know if we keep tapping our toes like we did at the start, it will most likely continue the same way. and that's very satisfying.
i am hardly an expert in linguistics, but i would imagine that there is, somewhere in the world, a linguistic analogue to atonal music, and that speakers of such an 'atonal language' would have a harder time learning a 'tonal language,' just as most people do not immediately understand the value of atonal music.
i think this is a fascinating study, insofar as it proposes a link between music and language... a link whose origins we can probe and explore, with (i suspect) great benefit to linguists everywhere.
Humor me for a minute. Trolls and offtopic posts (and opposing views that introduce counter-evidence and new concepts) are modded down because they threaten to make the song atonal (or polytonal), or "incomprehensible," as the article says. If you're a musician, you know that excessive accidentals make the specified key pointless and virtually nonexistent. It's frustrating to play, and sometimes not pleasing to listen to.
People who write sausages in their post, are just proving what was said in the article.
The fact that sausage was written down, means you are more likely to use it, and the fact that it said it wouldn't appear makes it 284% more likely to appear in each post.
Sausages. Hi to Rich sausages.
Apart from being a fun mathematical excercise, the only vaguely interesting thing this study says in its current form, is that there is a certain similarity between the spoken word, Bach, Debussy and Mozart on one hand, and Schoenberg on the other hand. However, not even this is particularly interesting, as Schoenberg explicitly tried to avoid just this kind of pattern. Had it been done with Stockhausen, Berio or (at least some of the early) Penderecki pieces, it would be more interesting.
Now it's just fun. No harm in that.
Rule number one of experimental research: get a representative sample. Four is not enough even for objects within one group and these items are distributed over 2 groups (tonal vs. a-tonal), with one group containing only one item! That's *BAD* research.
Furthermore, it is highly obvious that tonal music produces a steeper curve according to the measure chosen, since the number of possible notes that follow each other is more limited than in a-tonal music, where in some pieces the requirements strictly demand that the same note shall not be repeated before any of the 11 other notes has been played. That accounts for quite a lot.
Furthermore, the article *completely* fails to explain why a steeper curve would make something more understandable. Zipf's law can be found in nearly all natural processes (check Mandelbrot's work on it), but that doesn't mean that e.g. interruptions in the telephone system will look like a language to us.
Resuming? Utter, utter non-sense.
In my mind, the least granular distincition in music culturally is between western and eastern music, so I will start there. I assume my ear is culturally biased. When I hear western music, it flows well for me, I can "feel" where the song is going. However when I listen to eastern music, I'm constantly guessing where the music is going to go, and thus, doesn't flow as well for me. I do not believe that one music is technically or artistically superior to the other, but I just feel that our "cultural ear" listens to them differently.
I would have liked to see this paper address the possibility that the context of the music could correspond to not only linguistics in general, but rather specific frequencies and sentence structures of the cultures that the music comes from.
Steve
(puts on Erwartung)
Well, duh! What's the news? Hasn't everyone who listens to classical music known this for over 80 years?
11:15, restate my assumptions:
1. Mathematics is the language of nature.
2. Everything around us can be represented and understood through numbers.
3. If you graph these numbers, patterns emerge.
Therefore: There are patterns everywhere in nature.
The article also considers 3 tonal pieces and 1 atonal - I don't see how you can come up with a conclusion based on just one piece either, when you don't consider other atonal music with more "regular" structure...
There isn't also just atonal and tonal, music from other parts of the world surely "speaks" to people from other countries, otherwise we'd have all ended up with the chromatic Western system today.
Music and language are indeed similar in many ways. Have you ever noticed that English intonation (other languages too) is exactly the same thing that we define as melody? Intonation in some languages is quite monotonous, but in some languages, like English, it is very apparent that speakers are actually singing the sentences they are saying.
"Two things inspire me to awe -- the starry heavens above and the moral universe within." - Albert Einstein
Although I still listen to music, I think that music is better off for the most part without words altogether. Look at Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata. Could you imagine it with words? I cant. Music expresses emotion. We shouldn't use words to express emotions, we should use notes.
That's my opinion, at least. Im sure everyone else disagrees.
so the original poster needed to choose a random, unrelated word to illustrate his point......
and promptly settled on
"sausage"...
i see, so that's how it works......;)
Ask a good jazz pianist to play a solo. During the solo, try and engage her in conversation. Either she will continue soloing, or she'll talk to you -- but she won't be able to do both.
I've tried this several times while sitting at the keys. The same part of my brain that strings together sentences is busy creating musical phrases -- it stubbornly refuses to multitask.
That this relation exists has been known to jazzists for some time: pianist Bill Evans is revered for his 'conversational' improv style. A master of tone color, Bill could say something humorous or profound with each cluster of notes.
Musicology - long history of research, tons of papers, stuff on score analysis and psychoacoustics thats pretty incredible. However, especially for psycho acoustics, theres little research outside of western cultures.
Computer science - Frequently individuals with a hobby that have brought formidible computing skills and analysis techniques from other fields, but are largely ignorant of the works within music departments (see pretty much any IEEE paper on music for examples). Biggest problem is typically lack of statistically valid experiments (like the test sample of 4 pieces in this article).
Ethnomusicology - The first 20 years of the fields existance (~55-~75) was dedicated to this kind of research. Now that computers are powerful enough to do more meaningful analysis, the backlash against this analysis is fading, but any ethnomusicologist can tell you all the pitfalls - especially how critical cultural context is to the analysis.
As for the relationship between music and language, both music and language are tightly tied to culture. In that sense, they are similar. Anything more profound requires an accurate, precise definition of the two terms. This is extremely difficult and a good way to start a fight with ethnomusicologists if your so inclined.
The number you have dialed is imaginary, please rotate your phone 90 degrees and try again.
A year or two ago I was commissioned to do a soundtrack for a choreographer in Istanbul, and I put the whole thing together around a time-stretched (factor of 10) recording of the choreographer reading aloud in Turkish from a rather dry techical print article on botany. Curiously, when the time-stretch revealed the tones which, in ordinary speech, pass by too quickly to be recognised, lots of the tone sequences fell into triad and scale runs. If you listen to the piece, there's a clear major-triad sequence right at the beginning; in real time, it occurs in less than a fifth of a second.
I think your comment was completely uncalled for. Please don't use the word respect that way. It's so hypocritical. Besides, you don't need to respect (or even understand) another genre in order to understand music. Music speaks for itself. If someone doesn't like what one genre is saying, it does NOT mean they have no understanding of music.
Please reread your sig. You may find it helpful.
(note: I wrote three times this much, and only posted what I wrote after calming down.)
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
Unfortunately, you're limited to the letters a,b, c, d, e, f, and g though. So you can say BAG and GAB or CAB or even CABBAGE. However, the lack of the other 19 letters means that music will never be as truly expressive as natural language.
{old Harvard Lampoon bit}
There even exists a _real_ musical language, in which musical patterns represent actual words. This language was developed in the 19th century, by Sudre, and was called Solresol. He even wrote dictionaries and such. It never really cought on.
More info on Solresol
Z
Mathematics is the language of Nature.
Do you have the original reference for the SciAm article? -- I'd be interested in taking a closer look
.......
Biologists aspire to be chemists.
Chemists aspire to be physicists.
The physicist aspires to be God.
God aspires to be a mathematician.
Dr. Johnson: (reads)
"Once upon a time there was a lovely little sausage called `B--
Sausage?!
SAUSAGE?!!!!!
Oh, blast your eyes!" (throws paper down and exits angrily)
Having had a quick RTFA, it's clear that there's plenty of substance in this research. On the other hand, I'm a perl geek, and I wanna hear what Larry has to say on the subject! He is *the* man where languages and linguistics are concerned after all, and there's probably More Than One Way To Do It In Music!
I find your ideas intriguing and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
coming from the book that tells the meaning of life, shouldnt the babelfish be able to translate music to speech assuming it is a language?
Well, then, there it is: a new(?) method to complement Bayesian spam filters.
Paragraph of random dictonary words will be easily recognised as dump me tag.
I don't know if this goes into Computer Science or Musicology, but people have tried composing music using mathematical equations for quite some time...
:
For example, I propose (also an example here
This site also gives fractal and algorithmic music to download while this one give you the opportunity to download a fractal music software (Windows, sorry)
Maybe we can get a computer to compose like Mozart and finish his symphonie ?
Something like these people do
"We are a group of students and faculty members in the University of Wisconsin - Madison working on the exciting project of applying artificial intelligence in analyzing and composing music.
In this research, mathematical models will be developed to analyze a given collection of music pieces, represented in MIDI format. In particular, machine learning and artificial intelligence problem solving methods such as neural network, time series prediction, and statistical pattern classification will be used, and to simulate the process of music composition through the results of analysis. The overall objective is to analyze polyphonic music of certain composers, and create new pieces that retain stylistic details which distinguish composers from one another. "
You can even dowload some of their computer generated music...
As you yourself said, "individuals with a hobby that have brought formidable computing skills and analysis techniques from other fields" (really nice javadoc...) but I'm not sure they "are largely ignorant of the works within music departments", as they seem to take a nice approach on the subject...
It takes 40+ muscles to frown, but only four to extend your arm and bitchslap the motherfucker
Music that speaks, ey?
Isn't that called "rap music"?
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
With language you can say things so general and abstract. You can also be very, very specific if you take greater care.
IMO, one of the big downfalls of language (English, anyway) is that it is much too easy to be imprecise and ambiguous. Even legal text which strives to be precise can be interpreted in different ways. This is a huge problem because years down the road after text is written and meant to capture a certain meaning, it can be re-interpreted years later to mean something else.
Is this a problem with every language? It seems like more of a problem these days, maybe just because I am noticing it more, but what can be done? Better education? English 2.0?
This sort of thing is not really new. Look up Doctrine of the Affections to see a similar idea that was popular in the 1600s. Personally, I believe the idea to be difficult to prove at best. The reason certain notes and chord progressions 'speak' to you has a mathematical foundation. Certain notes in tonal music have certain frequencies that overlap and produce a 'pleasant' sound. The reason atonal music does not sound good is purely based on mathematics! It would be difficult to say the same about spoken language as there is no mathematics involved at all. Of courses, back in the day, the Church prefered certain chord progressions based on this math, but justified it that certain "Perfect chords" were closer to god (thus perfect). This has had a huge impact on music and is still strongly in effect today.
This is hogwash. You can write atonal music with a great deal of recurring context. It isn't atonality that drops context it's the composer's decision not to repeat himself.
Sounds like a spectacularly uninteresting result to me. Language has something called a topic, so people tend to return to that. Tonal music has something called a key, so people will return to that too. Hence, maybe there's a correlation in pattern. That still doesn't make them the "same", as some other people have asserted.
Such irE
the writer of this article has been listening to "Frampton Comes Alive!" again...
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
for all the links on the net that tell us how google ranks pages... here is the reason/method behind their madness...
For those who did not bother reading the study, the author himself is painfully aware of the shortcoming of only studing pitches. He finishes with "It would be interesting to consider alternative extensions, at the level of melodic phrases, harmonic sequences, or rhythmic patterns, and thus explore the concept of musical context at different scales."
Heck yeah. For anyone who knows music of the last 100 years, it's not just about pitch and "key areas." The author of this study didn't know this apparently. Leave the musical analysis conclusions to musicians.
Scott
MM Theory/Composition
That popular entertainment is highly repetitive?!
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
George Kingsley Zipf discovered that if he ranked words in literary texts according to the number of times they appeared, a word's rank was roughly proportional to the inverse of the its frequency squared.
Huh? I should think that this "rank" would be exactly equal to its frequency, because that's how you're defining rank. Something is missing from this explanation.
"He argued that as a text progresses, it creates a meaningful context within which words that have been used already are more likely to appear than other, random words. For example, it is more likely that the rest of this article will contain the word 'music' than the word 'sausage'."
That is a revalation? It took an "expert" to tell us that a text dealing with a topic will have more words relating to that topic than words *not* relating to the topic?
I am again in awe of academia for muddling the obvious with "science".
sausage s a u s a g e sausage &sausage sausage sausage
spam spam spam spam
sausage s a u s a g e sausage sausage
ham ham ham ham
bacon sau sage sausage
Isaiah 43:19 (NCV)
Look at the new thing I am going to do. It is already happening. Don't you see it?
I'm not native English speaker. What's the fuss about this sausage joke, and how it's related to music?
The article is packed with assumptions suggesting that Zanette is not familiar with contemporary music theory. He does not employ standard music terminology. His concept of what constitutes a "note" doesn't make sense in tonal music. He seems to use simple scores (ot MIDI implementations of scores) as input, thus ignoring, for example, the evolution of notation and notational conventions. (Dude, a sixteenth note and an eighth note in a Bach piece might actually have exactly the same duration in an informed performance. No notated version of "Black Dog" describes exactly what goes on, metrically, between Page and Bonham.) The comments on Schoenberg and nontonal music are embarrassing. Statistical analysis of music has been around for decades and has yielded some interesting results. Zanette's results, alas, are not interesting and can be reasonably explained without reference to another inane "music is like language" assertion.
spam eggs sausage and spam...
If this kind of research interest you, and you're a student looking for an area of study, Computional Lingustics is an (IMHO) amazingly rich field of study, sausage notwithstanding.
void CShameless:Plug()
{
If you're running OS X, check out theConcept for an example of statistical language processing in action.
}
also reveals a key difference between tonal compositions
Wait, no! Is it a subtle difference? How come nobody's noticed it before? Why did we all always think that they were the same...
Ever start your car with a cat sitting on the manifold? - Michael GaribaldiFractals are subset of power laws.
Not all power law phenomena are fractal (e.g. brain size and body weight is power law, but not fractal).
Hmm, has anyone used this technique on spam texts? Spammers are adding a lot of irrelevant and even nonsense words to try and defeat Baysian filters, it seems to me this would make spam distinctivly less coherent.
if he ranked words in literary texts according to the number of times they appeared, a word's rank was roughly proportional to the inverse of the its frequency squared.
What you meant to say was that the rank is inversely proportional to the frequency squared ie. proportional to one divided by the frequency squared.
What you said was that it was proportional to the inverse of frequency squared ie. proportional to the square root of frequency.
George Kingsley Zipf discovered that if he ranked words in literary texts according to the number of times they appeared, a word's rank was roughly proportional to the inverse of the its frequency squared.
Aren't "frequency" and "number of times they appeared" measurements of the same thing? If a word happens frequently, it'll happen more often, right?
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
"Music is powerless to express anything at all"... or something like that, I think from it comes from his (in)famous Poetics Of Music... there we go with that poetry schtick again... most readers agree that Igor was probably being somewhat facetious, but his point was (as I take it) that music doesn't "express" or "have meaning", it just "sounds", and we go ahead and stick any number of beliefs and ideas on the experience... see Morton Feldman's commentary on this sort of thing... we can't have music that just sounds, now can we ?... also see Copland's remarks on audiences and what they think happens in a complex piece of music...
"Give them a jig and tale of bawdry, else they sleep." [William Shakespeare on his audience...]
I mainly hang out in Slashdot's science page, and always wait for something about music to come up in the topics -- while the science lover in me is fascinated with things like string theory and genetic manipulation, I can't ignore the 6 years I've spent so far studying composition.
But I'm not sure how to respond to this, since there seems to be so little of a point to this kind of study. To come out and say, "Hot news! Musical lines are put together like sentences!" is fine and dandy, it should raise the brow of any musician who might think in response, "Well, duh."
I can't understand the point in analysing pieces of music and counting notes (as if that had any sort of relevancy) -- one of the first thing a composer learns is that it's not the number of notes that make a piece of music enjoyable (see John Cage's 4'33"). A tonal piece will always return to tonic (for example, a piece in the key of C will have quite a few Cs in it). We'll call this the "subject matter" of the conversation. If this one note, then, is so important to the sentence, how do you explain some of Beethoven's later works, where he would avoid the tonic for long periods of time? Dancing around the subject?
It just seems like a completely pointless study -- you can not compare early Schoenberg works, which were more like experiments in sound than anything, to works by Beethoven and Mozart. I would suggest he take a look at Schoenberg's later works, or maybe pieces by his students Berg and Webern. Serial music, as it's called, uses fragments that are repeated in different shapes and forms (inverted, backwards, etc). While they're not always the same notes, they have the same distance between each note. Serial music grew out of pure atonal music, and would be a much better basis of comparison. To look at early Schoenberg and comparing it to Mozart would be like comparing the babblings of a baby to the writings of a Poet Laureate.
While an interesting study, I think there are many bases left unconvered and many things unaccounted for -- if anything, this is a good "starting point" for more in-depth study. I think this is, along with studies regarding the "Mozart Effect", is a fine example of scientific research that requires assistance from people who actually study music. (Though this can apply to any kind of research that tries to blend science and something non-scientific.)
Then again, I think this is another example of why scientists should keep their hands off music. I would never dare try and clone three headed chickens. *grin*
Did that mathematical expression say that the chances of re-using one of the 2000 most used words is slightly less than one? That, of course, includes words like a, and, but, if , or, and many others. And the chances of a musical note or sequence being used again is also slightly less than 100 percent? Duh! What are the chances that you will use a word that you don't know the meaning of, or that you will hum a tune you don't know? Slim, but not zero of course!
It told me to murder kittens and have carrot cake afterwards. Or was it... SATAN???
Cozinha para as massas (e para geeks)
For example, it is more likely that the rest of this article will contain the word 'music' than the word 'sausage'.
Guards, guards! Stop that man! He's violating the laws of physics!
This reminds me of a story an art teacher told me years ago.
There was a contest between two artists they were famous ones - Michelangelo, Davinci or something, but I wasn't paying attention and art isn't my strength.
Anyways, the first guy steps up to the easel everyone's wondering what brilliant piece of art he is going to produce. He draws a circle. That's all - just a circle. But the shocked onlookers start to look more closely. They get out their tools and it turns out it is a perfect circle drawn freehand. Everyone is suitably impressed.
Now it's the second guys turn and no-one can imagine what he can possibly put on his canvas to top the first guy. He walks over to the other guys canvas and puts a dot on it. Yep, you guessed it. It was in the dead center of the circle.
I'm just wondering if these are urban legends or something like that.
So does Anonymous Coward have good karma?
Notes are clearly the wrong thing to use, the same music piece played backwards will come up with the same stats, therefore it sounds just as good as the original. Maybe this works for rock satanists, but I doubt this is the rule!
I don't know about the art one as none of my cousin's friend's uncle's daughters were there ;)
Hey There ...
...
For all you Neal Stephenson fans
Doesn't this article scream Snow Crash's neolinguistic hacking?
Thanks,
-- The Dude
SDLead:How's the release doing?
Dev: what? (removing headphones)
SDLead: What are you listening?
Dev: Uh? music.
SDLead (looking at CD cover): Pink Floyd eh? Groovy! let me hear (putting headphones). Whats the name of the song?
Dev: One of these days.
SDLead: What?
Dev: ONE OF THESE DAYS!!!
SDLead(taking off headphones): This music doesn't
speak to me..is too loud. What does it mean?
Dev: The release was checked in 2 hrs ago.
SDLead: Cool, later man!
- these are not the droids you are looking for -
...there is a correlation between music (without words) and speech, but it is similar to the correlation between feeling an emotion and reading/hearing some sort of analysis. I believe music can do a very good job of conveying emotion (which I'm seeing as language's metadata) while language is much better at conveying specific meaning, with emotion possibly attached. I would put the musical "message" at a "higher" metadata level, which is not usually so explicit in speech.
Linguistics does recognize some relationship between speech and music. A speech sound (syllable) can be broken down in to "onset" and "coda" which I believe are also musical terms (There's also "nucleus" which is irrelevant here). Perhaps a linguist borrowed these terms from the mucisal context. There are also "prosidy", "stress" and "rythm" which are recognized by Linguists as existing in speech.
Wikipedia has some good info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syllable
I'm curious if someone has ever attempted to write music (again, without words) that attempts to convey the same meaning as a particular set of words (a speech, a book, etc.). I can think of examples of larger ideas like Vivaldi's 4 seasons, but have heard of nothing like what I mentioned above. I think this would be a very difficult task to do well.
Music and language cna express similar things, and some things just as well. But some things, like math, we can best use words. I we were clever enough wqe could manipulate music to mean things, but that would spoil the abstract elusive quality that makes music so great...
photoplankton
You're right, we've only known this for thousands of years. Here's a good book on the subject. (No, I don't make any money from this link.)
The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.
--Aristotle
are you joking? time to enroll in Theory 101. (for the record, a phrygian cadence is iv6 - V. not an augmented 6 chord, because the first inversion subdominant is diatonic)
Excellent point. Take, for example, one of the best plays I've seen lately... the Last 5 Years. The chronology is a bit disheveled... one character starts out at the beginning of the relationship, the other at the end. I'm guessing the guy who wrote the whole thing probably wrote it all in order, then rearranged the pieces to add to the drama. Even if he/she did intend to mix them up from the day he/she started writing.
In the world of writing, revision is king. You're never stuck with a beginning, or a middle, or an end.
and some cases illegal (the Gone With The Wind 'remix' where entire passages are retold in slave era black speak, massa).
Do you refer to The Wind Done Gone? A higher court lifted the injunction on that work.
Take a single sentence from it, and use it in a completely different context and you are fine.
The late George Harrison took a sentence from a popular song and lost a lawsuit.
Then again, this is being asked on Slaskdot where people don't understand the outrage at a piece of software that emulates an iPod exactly and is named pPod.
That's different. When cloning a program, it's easy to shut out access to the expression by simply refraining from reading the first program's source code or object code. What you copy when you don't read the source code of a program is the uncopyrightable idea of its operation. This is how all those Tetris clones turned out to be legal in the end.
With music, on the other hand, almost anybody inundated with Western culture can reduce a recording to its source code effortlessly, as part of the process of "humming" it. Despite the conclusions of this article, current copyright case law recognizes little "idea" in music but only "expression." There's no way to avoid access to copyrighted works because places of commerce almost universally play copyrighted music in the background over the PA speaker.
Again, if you are not an idiot, its clearly drawn in front of you any you didn't have to rip off someone else fully to make your 'art'.
That's what George Harrison thought. Or are you calling a late Beatle an "idiot"? And what steps can I take to become no longer an "idiot" myself?
The even tempered scale is based on powers of the twelfth roots. It became popular around the time of Bach, and he wrote the Well Tempered Clavier as a demonstration of how much even tempering offers to composers and performers.
As someone else pointed out in this thread, there are other scales based on perfect intervals. One can generate the whole scale based on perfect fifths. I played with it in Matlab a little although to generate other scales I have trouble describing the differences. Using perfect intervals instead of the approximation that twelfth roots offers ruins some keys, but there is something appealing when it sounds just right.
Well, there are institutions that maintain databases of copyrighted works.
Unlike the trademark database, I don't see how the copyright database is searchable by content.
You have to rely on the low probability of two composers writing the same tune.
Had you read the essay linked from the word "taken" (I'll link it again), you would see that this probability isn't as low as you claim.
Consider the following 'text' where I'll use single letters rather than distinct words.
Here a will have rank 1, b will have rank 2, c will have rank 3, etc.Now consider this 'text'
The absolute and relative frequencies are markedly different for a and b, yet their ranks will be the same.For an arbitrary string of words, there need be no direct relation between the frequency of a word and its rank (by 'direct relation' I mean some kind of proportionality, thus discounting the obvious preservation/reversion of order between rank and frequency.) The observation of Zipf is that for 'natural' texts (i.e. real human written text for the purpose of communication) there is a proportionality going on between ranks and frequencies.
John_Chalisque
Does anybody know if a similar result happens to Zipf's result when we allow repeated phrases to be treated similarly to words in his analysis?
e.g. in 'a a b a b a b c a b c a b a' we would have frequences of a:7, b:5, c:2, 'a b':5, 'a b c':2 'c a':2 'c a b':2 etc.
Just curious...
John_Chalisque
Neil Young is great at getting so much from one note.
Edward Rothstein cites such performances as examples of the sublime. Edmund Burke wrote one of the classic treatises on what differentiates the sublime from other pleasurable and artistic experiences. (I have only read a tiny bit myself.) Such distinctions seem, in many ways, artificial, deceptive and even outright false. There is something resonant about them, however.
Ah hah! Gotcha. Thanks for the crisp explanation.
It would be nice if this proves that without melody and harmony (i.e., "Rap") we no longer have music! (which is my hypothesis.)
Best Buy can have you arrested
I know, from practical experience, that the probability is quite low, unless we are talking about tunes consisting of 2 or 3 notes.
Shark's theme from Jaws.
Even for more reasonably long melody fragments, what contingency plan do you have should the improbable (i.e. a plagiarism lawsuit) happen?
In Douglas Adams' book Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency the main character made his name with software that translates business figures into music. Apparently now someone is trying to get a PhD based on it. Douglas Adams is such a visionary.
move along, nothing to
I think you're interpreting the passage (itself written romantically) incorrectly.
What the passage is saying is that your first sentence, wherever it falls in the book, cements the rest of the work into place. When you write a song, one note means nothing, it could be an accidental in a song in a different key, but once you have a few notes it becomes a song and it has a specific feeling.
Once you've begun to convey a feeling, you're stuck with it.
Then again, maybe the author started writing, "The artwork's potential is never...." and couldn't stop.
The Conducter sez: Whatever it is, in improvised jazz it is on purpose, almost by definition.
They're called accidentals anyway. Even if they're on purpose. An accidental is a note that falls outside of the scale you're in.
Luckily I play atonal music. I can't be scientificized.
> In the 1930s, American social scientist George Kingsley Zipf discovered that if he ranked words in literary texts according to the number of times they appeared, a word's rank was roughly proportional to the inverse of the its frequency squared.
No, no! Looks like the poster hasn't understood Zipf's law to begin with. The law states that the number of occurences of a word (and not its rank) is roughly proportional to the inverse of its frequency squared.
A rank of r means that the word is the r-th most frequent word. Zipf's law then leads to the conclusion that for large ranks, the number of occurences of a word is roughly proportional to the inverse of its rank. For example, the 100-th most frequent word occurs 10 times more than the 1000-th most frequent word. This is not at all a trivial observation if you think carefully about the difference between the rank of a word and the number of its occurences.
So to truly understand Zipf's law, first you have to clearly grok the difference between the number of words which occur a given number of times, the number of times that a word occurs, and the rank of a word which is the number of other words that occur lesser times than this word. http://linkage.rockefeller.edu/wli/zipf/ hs links to articles for a clearer understanding of the law.
Do they act the same in the brain? No. They're processed in different ways and by different parts of the brain.
Can they be treated the same? Damn right. The human brain is so designed to process stuff as language that it can use music as language. Neural plasticity, the ability of the brain to alter itself to do different things in different ways in different locations, is one of its miracle-like qualities.
Proving it can do something without training the brain to do so, and so confusing the results, is the hard part.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
A more sophisticated analysis would try to equate musical phrases with words. Simply counting notes is like counting letters.
Intervals would be better than notes. Why? Because an interval creates context while a note does not.
Example: consider two quarter notes: C then E. Now consider C then A. Both imply chords: the first, a C major chord and the second an A minor chord. *You will have different emotional responses to each pair of notes.* [This is largely because you are likely (if you are reading this) to have grown up in the western tradition of even-tempered scaling, where the two major harmonic tonalities *are* major and minor chords. You are, in essence, preconditioned.]
Therefore, mapping the *intervals between the notes* -- rather than the notes themselves-- will give you a more accurate reading of a musical piece. I daresay, however, that the results that he got will remain about the same: tonal pieces are still more highly self-correlated than atonal pieces.
This also puts me in mind of a particular technique used in chaos theory. If you plot the differences in time between drips from a dripping faucet in succession versus each other: (X1 = diff2, Y1 = diff1; X2 = diff3, Y2 = diff2; etc.) you describe a 2D cross-section of a strange attractor. Now I wonder what would happen if you did this with elements of a musical piece, substituting "musical intervals" for "time differences". I strongly suspect that tonal music will produce repetitive figures and atonal music will produce -- well -- what looks like random noise.
DNA is a Turing machine. You, however, being dynamic and emergent, are not.
Heisenberg et al answer, "No."
The young musician then says, "D-minor, of course" to answer his own question. He says it in German, so "minor" becomes "moll."
Intrigued, Heisenberg asks, "Why?"
"Because they D-moll-ished the walls!"
"Do you like
Sa-sausages?"
Repeat for about five minutes, varying only toward the end where you slowly fade in;
"Do you like
cheeeeeeese?"
True story!
I have no tag line
Where do types of music fit into all this language talk that fall into the following:
- Noise/Power Electronics
- Glitch
- Drone
- Experimental/Found Sound/Chaotic (not in the mathematical sense of the word)
Music is nothing more than organized noise...what moves one person, can be frankly annoying to another.
Just because bb king plays one note for a solo, doesn't make him a better player than someone that plays a thousand...it's bb's way of expressing himself, one listener prefers technique over that one note, doesn't make one or the other right or wrong, nor does it make either a better (or inferior) player.
Music is a reflection of the artists personality, scientifically trying to describe music or emotion is impossible. We play what we feel, we write what we feel, no scientist can tell us what we are feeling...
On the Dminor key, all minor chords sound sad, it also depends on how the chords/notes are played, and what is being played/sung around it. Eminor can be just as sad, as can C Minor...
But always remember, for every major there is a relative minor! =]
A good example is the song Language is a Virus from Outer Space. The term was actually cointed by William S. Burroughs, and possibly Brian Gysin, who did lots of experiments on language involving cut ups, and randomizing words. One experiment involved recording the words yes and no repeatedly on a casset tape. They would then ask yes or no questions and use the tape as an oracle, using rewind of fast forward to randomize the answer.
After her one hit wonder O Superman, she signed a contract with Warner Brothers. Her first 4 albums were live. One of the earlier songs relied on the multimedia durring the performance to really understand it. (And remember this is the late 70s or early 80s.)
She showed different pictures. One was the picture of the man and the woman that were etched on the Voyager probes.
I hate Liberals and Conservatives.
If you are a Liberal or a Conservative, then HAVE A NICE DAY!
Courage.
"Physicist Damian Zanette of the Balseiro Institute in Bariloche, Argentina"
NOT
Linguist Damian Zanette
"Cornflakes are not the innocent critters they seem"- Sterling Morrison
One of the ideas that is elaborated on throughout the posts here is the that music is composed of "notes" which are repeatedly implied as specific wave frequencies (i.e. the A note, the B-flat note, etc.) This is really only part of the picture.
There is a significant amount of music that is composed of rhythms, and often from inharmonic or atonal instruments (i.e. percussion).
So, it's inaccurate to describe music exclusively with the concept of pitch. You must also incorporate rhythm. And even then, it may not be enough.
There is an infamous composition by John Cage called 4'33" - meaning 4 minutes, 33 seconds. It goes like this:
Pianist walks to a piano. Opens the lid. Sits for 4'33". Closes the lid, walks off stage. Some say that's not music, some say it is. Some say Andy Warhol is art, some say it's not. The interesting thing is only whether the "art" in question speaks to you personally. If it does it's art, if not it's not. Art is not unanimous. I use this description:
"Art is that thing which you so desperately wish to speak only to you". In other words, some work A may appeal to you and it's art. It may not appeal to me so it's not. It might appeal to you and three million other people and then it's not. While mass appreciation doesn't change the artifact you are appreciating, it can affect your appreciation of it.
He only chose 4 pieces--one by each Bach, Mozart, Debussy, and Schoenberg. Since the Bach, Mozart, and Debussy have tonal centers, most notes are going to come from the tonic scale, giving the statistical distribution. Schoenberg's works were written precisely to avoid any sort of tonal center--i.e. to avoid a non-uniform distribution of notes! All he discovered was that Schoenberg's piece statistically did not have a tonal center.
However, there are a lot of pieces that rotate tonal centers but are not atonal! This is sort of analagous to changing languages in the middle of a story. The distribution could be nearly equal in this case.
On the other hand, take Scriabin, whose later works are highly dissonant and atonal. Nevertheless, many are centered around certain notes. (In particular, Scriabin used a recurring "mystic chord" in many pieces) In this case, one could discover a similar non-uniform distribution of notes, despite the fact that the piece is extremely hard to comprehend.
To find a true analogy between music and language will require looking at a lot more than four pieces and a lot more than just notes.
--If the world didn't suck, we'd all fall off.
If music talks, why are there songs? Or, are words in songs just another tone?
Maybe these patterns are also in other senses like eyes and movement.
Wouldn't it be wonderful if you combined language with the broader range of sound and the broader range of motion. Why, it would almost be like a ballet!
Or would it smell like a sausage?
Those who have seen Memento will recognize something similar to that play's technique: scenes from the present are shown in color in reverse order, interleaved with scenes from the past in black and white in forward order. They collide at the end.