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 :-)
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.
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.
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.
"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.