Slashdot Mirror
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."
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 :-)
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.
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. --
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.
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
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.
My music talks to me, just listen to Pink Floyd's Keep Talking, and you'll hear a very familiar voice.
Learn something new.
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.
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
Of course it doesn't translate to words. They're comparing language symbols to music symbols. Several notes in a row somehow relates to several syllables in a row. They're just trying to figure out how.
It does translate to something akin to emotion. I really take my hat off to those individuals trying to understand what makes us interpret noise as music.
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
But of course, you don't know if Melville did write 'Call me Ishmael' as his first sentence. Maybe he started with his second chapter ('I stuffed a shirt or two into my old carpet-bag ...'), and later found out he needed to introduce his main character better. It's not like you're hanging over Melville's back each time you read the book. In writing, you're not stuck with anything before it's been published.
Your description seems to perpetuate the romantic myth of the work of art as an organic whole, and the artist as some sort of shaman, who works as a medium for the artwork. I'm not saying this is totally wrong -- the artist is probably just as much a medium as the cause of the artwork.
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
"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".
"There are only a few people who actually create in the order that the viewer/reader will perceives their art"
You mean, like all performing artists. I know you referenced the creative and visual arts, but as the article is also about music, wouldn't it be only fair to consider the performing arts? As a classical musician, I typically perform pieces written by others. My art is the performance. If you chose to listen to me, you would experience my art from beginning to end, in the order I would create it. In a performance, you can't take back notes you've already played. Often times, my interpretation is subject to change (even if only slightly from what I've prepared and practiced) with the mood of the particular performance. Part of the artistry is in never performing the same work the same way twice, so in that sense, the art is being created as and in the order in which the listener percieves it.
Respecting genres of music is like respecting religion. There's no point to it, and no practical value in doing so, other than if you don't, you might offend the liberals. ;)
That's funny. When I say something like "I don't respect the stupid fuckers who pray to a dead carpenter and consider eating crackers and drinking wine to be a holy act", it's usually the conservatives who get offended.
Maybe it's just me.
ZFS: because love is never having to say fsck