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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."
I'd hate to know what disco is saying to me!
Sausage.
(It had to be said.)
I don't know about you guys, but sometimes I feel a piece of music really sausages to me.
-fren
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 :-)
...and all it is saying to me is that cutting my own ears off could be blessed relief.
Beep beep.
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.
I shudder to think what kind of conversation is analagous to old Bill Shatner's musical attempts.
Making the moon less necessary since 1998.
I see how music could have some content in the way of emotion, and I guess that would count as a semantic composition, but whether individual phrases can translate to words, I'm not so sure about. Perhaps it has more to do with some sort of innate appeal to aesthetics, and as we listen to and formulate speech, it starts to conform to some aesthetic pattern. This isn't too far out. Some languages are considered more beautiful than others.
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. --
For example, it is more likely that the rest of this article will contain the word 'music' than the word 'sausage'.
Wrap your brain around that one, Ashcroft.
Literalism isn't a form of humor, it's you being irritating.
Many musicians already know this. Have you ever heard a soloist described as "lyrical"? (grep for "lyrical")
Have you ever heard a musician compare improvising a solo to "telling a story"(grep for "telling a story")
Ever heard a short musical idea described as a "phrase"?
Listening to a good jazz solo is a lot like listening to a conversation: There are main points, and there are variations on that point. It should be grounded but not to repetative
What is the soloist doing when he attempts to "build"? Actually the ideal process hardly ever takes place--that is, it is hardly ever the case that a conscientious soloist plays a thinking solo for a hard-listening hearer--but when this does happen, the key process is memory. The soloist has to establish for the listener what the important POINT, the motif if you like, is, and then show as much as he can of what it is that he sees in that motif, extending the relationships of it to the basic while never giving the feeling that he has forgotten it. In other words, I believe that it should be a basic principle to use repetition, rather than variety--but not too much. The listener is constatnly making predictions; actual infinitesimal predictions as to whether the next event will be a repetition of something, or something different. The player is constantly either confimring or denying these predictions in the listener's mind. As nearly as we can tell (Kraehenbuehl at Yale and I), the listener must come out right about 50% of the time--if he is too successful in predicting, he will be bored; if he is too unsuccessful, he will give up and call the music "disoganized."
Thus if the player starts a repetitive pattern, the listener's attention drops away as soon as he has successfully predicted that it is going to continue. Then, if the thing keeps going, the attention curve comes back up, and the listener becomes interested in just how long the pattern is going to continue. Similarly, if the player never repeats anything, no matter how tremendous an imagnation he has, the listener will decide that the game is not worth playing, that he is not going to be able to make any predections right, and also stops litening. Too much difference is sameness: boring. Too much sameness is boring--but also different once in a while.
-Richmond Browne
WARNING: If accidentally read, induce vomiting.
"I'd hate to know what disco is saying to me!"
Buy a pair of polyester bell-bottom pants, and wear lots of jewelry.
So magic really isn't some transcendental hokus-pokus, it's really a description of the abilities of those who have studied and mastered the art of predicting the next set of actions based upon previous vocal intonations.
+++ATHZ 99:5:80
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.
Jimbo: Man, that guy's guitar is talking.
Otto: Hey, my shoes are talking too!
Left Shoe: Don't worry. We won't hurt you.
Right Shoe: We only want to have some fun.
All kinds of nonrandom data follows the Zipf distribution, not just written texts. But the relationship between music and language is interesting nonetheless, especially when you consider the psychological aspects, for instance language learning versus music learning.
I appreciate the mathematical analysis of music, but it's important to note that Western music originated out of liturgical chanting (Organum) and folk music. Since the composers of both were generally writing to texts, they naturally placed musical phrase-endings (cadences) at the end of phrases. Therefore, music naturally followed our preconceived ideas of language. Furthermore, since musical understanding is primarily a learned phenomena (compare South-East Asian music with Western; both cultures appreciate their own music first but can learn the other's), it is natural that our learned conception of melody would continue in its textual beginnnings simply through continual, generational reinforcement of the format of melodic conception.
So, given my experiences downtown, "f***" has a frequency of what, 0.0001?
Sheesh, I'd swear people down there are capable of holding complete and intricate conversations using solely that word.
It must be the most musical word of all.
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
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."
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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.
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
Sheesh, I'd swear people down there are capable of holding complete and intricate conversations using solely that word
and you'd be right!
uses of the word
This is pretty trivial. Zipf's Law is regarded in linguistics as a curiosity rather than a deep result. It doesn't really explain anything interesting about language. Music and language are both more and less similar than both following Zipf's Law suggests. On the one hand, as a previous poster has pointed out, language is meaningful. Music may have an emotional impact, but it isn't meaningful in the sense in which language is. On the other hand, there are deeper similarities in the formal structure, pointed out by Fred Lerdahl and Ray Jackendoff in their 1983 book A Generative Theory of Tonal Music.
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.
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Apparently, the probability of the word 'sausage' appearing was still pretty good.
Whatever it is I'm complaining about, I'm sure the Republicans did it. This is
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For the ancient Greeks, music and language were inseparable. 'Mousike' meant choral songs, solo songs with or without instrumentation, and poetic recitations. They did have instrumental music - on stringed and reed instruments mostly - but that wasn't in the same class.
'Mousike' was the art of the 'mousai', Muses. 'Mousa' could be a common noun as well as a goddess, meaning "metrical speech". The word is a derivative of 'mna-', "to remember out loud" - same root as "mental" and "memory", which we get from Latin cognates.
You find a similar thing in Vedic Sanskrit. 'Sangita' means "song-and-movement"; it might include instrumental accompaniment, but purely instrumental music was something altogether. Many Greek musical terms also implicitly include the element of dance: Classical Greeks would have found a 'khoros', "chorus" that didn't move to be a contradiction in terms.
In addition to Zanette's work on music and language, there's also some interesting work being done on language and movement (e.g. George Lakoff). Hooking all of these together and getting a picture of how music, cognition and motor function work together is going to be very interesting.
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The old ethnomusicologist in me is tempted to dismiss this as a poorly designed study -- jazz and classical music alone does not make for a representative sample, and people in different parts of the world like all kinds of music that other people find unpalatable. Furthermore, you can't apply his method directly to West African drumming, which is a very popular and exciting music, but you could to the cultural crime that is Britney Spears. ;-)
.5x would come next (octaves), followed by 3x/2 (the dominant) and 4x / 3 (subdominant)... until you get to that nasty tritone.
But looking over the linked study, it's actually quite an elegant look at European and American music. It's neat that the frequency of frequencies (har har) in song parallels the frequency of words in novels. That doesn't mean that "Zipf music" inherently speaks to its listeners, just that people are attracted to this kind of basic math in the world. It's like finding a Golden Ratio -- pretty frickin' cool.
I wish I could see which notes were which on the diagrams. My suspicion is that the relative uses of each note corresponds to the mathematical relationship of the frequency to the tonic. So if x is the tonic, 2x /
Atonal music intentionally avoids emphasizing the mathematically strong relationships, liberating the composer from maintaining that pesky context to a tonic. So it makes sense that Zipf's law won't apply. But before we conclude that people dislike atonal music because it deviates from Zipf, we must answer whether we might also dislike it because we have been indoctrinated into tonality at an early age. And that's where cross-cultural studies are most valuable.
Why did I leave academia to work on websites? This stuff is fun!
rouftop
QAExpress: Solid bug tracking for you. Graphs and reports for your PHB.
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.
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
Although I still listen to music, I think that music is better off for the most part without words altogether. Look at Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata. Could you imagine it with words? I cant. Music expresses emotion. We shouldn't use words to express emotions, we should use notes.
That's my opinion, at least. Im sure everyone else disagrees.
Ask a good jazz pianist to play a solo. During the solo, try and engage her in conversation. Either she will continue soloing, or she'll talk to you -- but she won't be able to do both.
I've tried this several times while sitting at the keys. The same part of my brain that strings together sentences is busy creating musical phrases -- it stubbornly refuses to multitask.
That this relation exists has been known to jazzists for some time: pianist Bill Evans is revered for his 'conversational' improv style. A master of tone color, Bill could say something humorous or profound with each cluster of notes.
Musicology - long history of research, tons of papers, stuff on score analysis and psychoacoustics thats pretty incredible. However, especially for psycho acoustics, theres little research outside of western cultures.
Computer science - Frequently individuals with a hobby that have brought formidible computing skills and analysis techniques from other fields, but are largely ignorant of the works within music departments (see pretty much any IEEE paper on music for examples). Biggest problem is typically lack of statistically valid experiments (like the test sample of 4 pieces in this article).
Ethnomusicology - The first 20 years of the fields existance (~55-~75) was dedicated to this kind of research. Now that computers are powerful enough to do more meaningful analysis, the backlash against this analysis is fading, but any ethnomusicologist can tell you all the pitfalls - especially how critical cultural context is to the analysis.
As for the relationship between music and language, both music and language are tightly tied to culture. In that sense, they are similar. Anything more profound requires an accurate, precise definition of the two terms. This is extremely difficult and a good way to start a fight with ethnomusicologists if your so inclined.
The number you have dialed is imaginary, please rotate your phone 90 degrees and try again.
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.
Unfortunately, you're limited to the letters a,b, c, d, e, f, and g though. So you can say BAG and GAB or CAB or even CABBAGE. However, the lack of the other 19 letters means that music will never be as truly expressive as natural language.
{old Harvard Lampoon bit}
There even exists a _real_ musical language, in which musical patterns represent actual words. This language was developed in the 19th century, by Sudre, and was called Solresol. He even wrote dictionaries and such. It never really cought on.
More info on Solresol
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Having had a quick RTFA, it's clear that there's plenty of substance in this research. On the other hand, I'm a perl geek, and I wanna hear what Larry has to say on the subject! He is *the* man where languages and linguistics are concerned after all, and there's probably More Than One Way To Do It In Music!
I find your ideas intriguing and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
With language you can say things so general and abstract. You can also be very, very specific if you take greater care.
IMO, one of the big downfalls of language (English, anyway) is that it is much too easy to be imprecise and ambiguous. Even legal text which strives to be precise can be interpreted in different ways. This is a huge problem because years down the road after text is written and meant to capture a certain meaning, it can be re-interpreted years later to mean something else.
Is this a problem with every language? It seems like more of a problem these days, maybe just because I am noticing it more, but what can be done? Better education? English 2.0?
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.
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".
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.
spam eggs sausage and spam...
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.
}
"Music is powerless to express anything at all"... or something like that, I think from it comes from his (in)famous Poetics Of Music... there we go with that poetry schtick again... most readers agree that Igor was probably being somewhat facetious, but his point was (as I take it) that music doesn't "express" or "have meaning", it just "sounds", and we go ahead and stick any number of beliefs and ideas on the experience... see Morton Feldman's commentary on this sort of thing... we can't have music that just sounds, now can we ?... also see Copland's remarks on audiences and what they think happens in a complex piece of music...
"Give them a jig and tale of bawdry, else they sleep." [William Shakespeare on his audience...]
In Douglas Adams' book Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency the main character made his name with software that translates business figures into music. Apparently now someone is trying to get a PhD based on it. Douglas Adams is such a visionary.
move along, nothing to
"Physicist Damian Zanette of the Balseiro Institute in Bariloche, Argentina"
NOT
Linguist Damian Zanette
"Cornflakes are not the innocent critters they seem"- Sterling Morrison