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."

Comments

Sausage.

[torpor]

... and the crowd goes wild ...

*APPLAUSE* *HOLLER* *APPLAUSE* *CHEER* *WÜRSTCHEN* *APPLAUSE*

Cultural Differences?

[frenchs]

From a quick read of the paper, I noticed that he sticks mainly to classical music. I think a natural extension of such a theory that he proposes would be to try different types of music, and specifically music from different cultures.

In my mind, the least granular distincition in music culturally is between western and eastern music, so I will start there. I assume my ear is culturally biased. When I hear western music, it flows well for me, I can "feel" where the song is going. However when I listen to eastern music, I'm constantly guessing where the music is going to go, and thus, doesn't flow as well for me. I do not believe that one music is technically or artistically superior to the other, but I just feel that our "cultural ear" listens to them differently.

I would have liked to see this paper address the possibility that the context of the music could correspond to not only linguistics in general, but rather specific frequencies and sentence structures of the cultures that the music comes from.

Steve

Re:What...[EXACTLY!]

[bach37]

For those who did not bother reading the study, the author himself is painfully aware of the shortcoming of only studing pitches. He finishes with "It would be interesting to consider alternative extensions, at the level of melodic phrases, harmonic sequences, or rhythmic patterns, and thus explore the concept of musical context at different scales."

Heck yeah. For anyone who knows music of the last 100 years, it's not just about pitch and "key areas." The author of this study didn't know this apparently. Leave the musical analysis conclusions to musicians.

Scott
MM Theory/Composition