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Do Music and Language Obey the Same Rules?

Posted by michael on from the i-before-e-except-after-middle-c dept.

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."

4 of 384 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Hmm by kaschei · · Score: 1, Offtopic

    Why is living up to your expectations amazing you?

    --
    I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well. -Henry David Thoreau
  2. Obviously by night_flyer · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    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...
  3. google page rank explained... by zachmagaw · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    for all the links on the net that tell us how google ranks pages... here is the reason/method behind their madness...

  4. The key of Jericho by toddhisattva · · Score: 1, Offtopic
    Werner Heisenberg tells the following of a young, German-speaking musician: The young musician asks "Do you know the key of the trumpets of Jericho?"

    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!"