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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."
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
For a perfect example of this listen to Michael Brecker - Delta City Blues... if you don't get it, after hearing this jazz tune, you will...
Sorry I can't provide a link to the song... grin... but I am sure you all know where to find a copy.
flinging poop since 1969
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.
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... 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.
Well, if we get back to Derrida and those other annoying french intellectuals. . .
They were moving past de Sausure's model of signifier/signified, claiming a Nietzchean absence of the signified. Instead of underlying meaning, we have the text as a thing itself, that might suggest a deeper meaning (which is illusory), but really only "contains" "meaning" in the inter-relationships of it's components, in the concatenations.
Further, from a semiotic point of view, music or anything else created or even observed by man is a language of sorts.
Anyway, if I think about this crap any further, my little brain will have a big hurt.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
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Sheet music can convey timing, and to a lesser extent nuance, a major advantage over other tabulature forms. While I am not gifted with the ability ( I can't even read sheet ) I have met individuals who can translate the notes on the stave into "mental sound" for want of a better phrase. I believe this is considered the upper epsilon of sight-reading ability.
You may be interested to know that before the blossoming of broadcast and recorded performances, sheet music was the primary form of dissemination for musical compositions ( well, buh ) - but that people would often learn a piece from sheet without ever hearing it played.
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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.
I agree completely however, saying a piece has 572 As in it says nothing about the music. But it might say something about the statistical correlation between note frequency and tonal vs atonal composition.
M.
I haven't heard that, but I think another good example is "Blue Interlude (The Bittersweet Saga of Sugar Cane and Sweetie Pie)" by the Wynton Marsalis Septet. There's a short intro at the beginning where Marsalis introduces the sounds of the characters so you can follow the story better.
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.
There are 2 different meanings to the phrase "play a single note."
1. Play a certain pitch any number of times. If you play the same pitch 2 or more times then you are playing an interval : a unison. Playing the same pitch several times in a row has a meaning to it.
2. Play a certain pitch once and only once, and don't play any other pitches. In this case there is no interval and there really isn't any meaning. I think this is what the poster above meant when he said that a single note by itself has no meaning.
As for midi, try being moved by a synthisized speech of any good written work.
OK, just to make sure everyone gets this: MIDI, the Musical Instrument's Digital Interface, is a protocol for telling an instrument which notes to play, when to play them, when to stop playing them, the velocity to play them at and so on. It is not just the sound an old sound card makes while you're playing Doom. Yamaha have even made an acoustic piano that responds to MIDI. It sounds no more synthetic than punchcards used by old pianos in westerns.
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.
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.
nice.
This is all old news though.Herman Helmholtz noted that musical scales and their intervals tend to mimic the mother languages rises and falls in pitch and make them available to the musician for phrasing.
A good example of this would be Indian Raga and its 23 note octaves with rules on bending and sliding notes.
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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.
}
Great story
To me, this kinda shows how silly the part of the article about atonal music is. In tonal music, certain notes are more important than others, and you play them more; repeating the notes that are important landmarks in the key (say, C and G in the key of C) is part of what helps establish the key.
Atonal music tries to defeat the tendency to create a tonal center by forbidding this kind of repetition. In serialism, you have to construct melodies by using all 12 notes of the chromatic scale in a row, before repeating any note.
From the article: But the Schoenberg piece, one of the first truly atonal works, had a much flatter graph.
So, uh, of course it has a flatter graph. All 12 notes occur equally frequently, so the only reason the graph isn't perfectly flat is that he keeps separate statistics for whole notes, half notes, etc.
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There may only be 12 notes, but the individuality of the artist can make a big difference between two songs with similar melodies/chord progressions/lyrics.
By "individuality of the artist", do you mean of the songwriter or of the performer? If the latter, how would one interpret this in the context of Bright Tunes v. Harrisongs, 420 F. Supp. 177 (S.D.N.Y. 1976).