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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!
First time i've seen a comment consisting roughly only of the word "Sausage" being modded insightful, and is actually on topic!
^_^
If you're a musician, you know that excessive accidentals make the specified key pointless and virtually nonexistent.
That's generally referred to as jazz.
But when you do it on purpose, it's called heavy metal.
And when you do it on accident and then claim it's on purpose, it's called rock'n'roll.
But if you don't do it at all, it's called crap. ;)
Like what I said? You might like my music
sounds more like it was brought to you by the letters T, H, and C