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

Ut oh.

[Steamhead]

I'd hate to know what disco is saying to me!

Re:Ut oh.

[Epistax]

"You look good in that. Trust me. You won't regret it in 20 years."

Hmm

[B3ryllium]

Sausage.

(It had to be said.)

Re:Hmm

[Soul-Burn666]

First time i've seen a comment consisting roughly only of the word "Sausage" being modded insightful, and is actually on topic!

Re:Hmm

[mog007]

My music talks to me, just listen to Pink Floyd's Keep Talking, and you'll hear a very familiar voice.

Re:Hmm

[ziggy_zero]

From the book Art and Fear (published in '01), which I highly recommend:

The artwork's potential is never higher than in that magic moment when the first brushstroke is applied, the first chord struck. But as the piece grows, technique and craft take over, and imagination becomes a less useful tool. A piece grows by becoming specific. The moment Herman Melville penned the opening line. "Call me Ishmael", one actual story - Moby Dick--began to separate itself from a multitude of imaginable others. And so on through the following five hundred-odd pages, each successive sentence in some way had to acknowledge and relate to all that preceded. Joan Didion nailed this issue squarely (and with trademark pessimism) when she said, "What's so hard about that first sentence is that you're stuck with it. Everything else is going to flow out of that sentence. And by the time you've laid down the first two sentences, your options are all gone."

It's the same for all media: the first few brushstrokes to the blank canvas satisfy the requirements of many possible paintings, while the last few fit only that painting - they could go nowhere else. The development of an imagined piece into an actual piece is a progression of decreasing possibilities, as each step in execution reduces future options by converting one - and only one - possibility into a reality. Finally, at some point or another, the piece could not be other than it is, and it is done.

Re:Hmm

[MrHanky]

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.

Re:Hmm

[proj_2501]

sounds more like it was brought to you by the letters T, H, and C

Re:Hmm

[liquidsin]

That description really only seems to work for painting, where each brush stroke is a near permanent piece of the finished product. Even if covered up with another colour, the original will still show through in some minute way. As another poster has pointed out, Melville very well may have written the second chapter first, then added the first later on to bring more depth to the story. I've written many songs before that come out nothing like they were originally imagined after stumbling on a guitar chord that sounds better than what I had in mind, or because rearranging a few pieces made them more interesting. A piece does grow by becoming specific, but it very well may change entirely from the first concept, and may not always be growing into the best piece that it could be, only the best that the artist could imagine at that time.

Re:Hmm

[flyneye]

nice.
This is all old news though.Herman Helmholtz noted that musical scales and their intervals tend to mimic the mother languages rises and falls in pitch and make them available to the musician for phrasing.
A good example of this would be Indian Raga and its 23 note octaves with rules on bending and sliding notes.

Re:Hmm

[violajack]

"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.

Well,

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know about you guys, but sometimes I feel a piece of music really sausages to me.

-fren

Implications for copyright?

[tepples]

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 :-)

Re:Implications for copyright?

[littlerubberfeet]

hmmm....Generally, you are correct, but it is all about context. I compose music for a living. We often imitate the temporary (scratch) music an editor laid in. I copy the mood of the piece, the style and the tempo, but nothing else if I can help it. Sometimes though, the editor is hell-bent on a certain sound. I can get away with 4 or five notes, often more, as long as it is not a blatant ripoff and they are the liable party. It is all subjective though An example with words:

"Oh Romeo, doth thy name and for thy name which is no part of thee, take all of myself."

I might change it: "Romeo: drop that last name of yours and come fuck me."

I could maybe get away with: "Oh Tyrome, deny your family; declare yourself free, and come fuck me."

As a musician, it is hard not to copy, not to realize that I have just dreged up a Led Zepplin riff from the back of my mind. Often, it is impossible not to copy to some degree. There are only so many ways to play 'something in D minor that sounds scary'.

I guess my point is: It is horribly subjective. The current standard is: If a judge/jury can discern that a riff came from a specific source (like the Simpson's theme or Close Encounters) you are screwed. I am all for letting small riffs be considered the words of music, but the issue is, where does one draw the line?

Re:Implications for copyright?

[Zenmonkeycat]

A motif, to me, tends to be more than just a word; more like a specific statement in context. Kind of like the "DSCH" motif in Shostakovich's Symphony #10, or the phrase "Just Do It." The notes or words that go together that way may occur in other works, but using that motif or phrase specifically is generally frowned upon.

Besides, if a 'word' is a motif of five to eight notes, a symphony would read like this: "Dmitri Shostakovich wrote this. Stalin was an overbearing ass. Stalin is dead now, and I'm still alive. Dmitri Shostakovich wrote this symphony. Suck it, Stalin."

Then again, works which repeat motifs tend to be more effective than works that go on without reiterating anything. Sort of like Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech, which uses that phrase over and over again to slam the point home.

Re:Implications for copyright?

[Scaba]

Scary? I thought D minor was the saddest of all keys?

My girlfriend is listening to VH1...

[Realistic_Dragon]

...and all it is saying to me is that cutting my own ears off could be blessed relief.

Re:My girlfriend is listening to VH1...

[Zork the Almighty]

And all of your paintings will automatically increase in value!

Sematic composition of music?

[adjwilli]

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.

Yeah

[radicalskeptic]

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

Not exactly solid linking

[Felonius Thunk]

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.

Obligatory Simpsons

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Odd

[GSPride]

The exact same thing could be said about spoken/written language. The nuance of spoken language is at least as important as the content of what's being said. Lets look at your two points, sheet music and midi. Sheet music (the written form of music) is unreadable by most people, at least in the way that we would read a book. If you consider music as a language, then most people who read sheet music must translate as they read. Sheet music is also informationaly dense. In adition to multiple notes played overlaping eachother, it contains information about tempo, volume, ect. It's the diffrence between reading a play and seeing it proformed. While both have meaning, seeing the play is more enjoyable because it has the nuance inherent too it, not noted in the stage directions. As for midi, try being moved by a synthisized speech of any good written work. You get just as much feeling out of an answering machine message as you do a computer reading Hamlet.

Reverse Causality

[Jazzsax]

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.

Inexplicable

[physicsphairy]

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.

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.

Smallest unit of musical meaning

[tritone]

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.

Re:Smallest unit of musical meaning

[Muttley]

From the article at arXiv.org the author states [included below] some reasoning for choosing single notes, or at least shows he thought about it. After the passage quoted below he goes on to mention that from a statistical point of view it makes more sense to use notes, seeing as each composition will have thousands of notes. I would argue that these compositions would probably not have all 156 (13x12, within one octave) intervals possible in them at least once.

I agree completely however, saying a piece has 572 As in it says nothing about the music. But it might say something about the statistical correlation between note frequency and tonal vs atonal composition.

An obvious difficulty in modelling the creation of musical context along the lines discussed in Section 2 for language, which are based on the statistics of word usage, resides in the fact that the notion of word cannot be unambiguously extended to music (Boroda and Polikarkov, 1988). In language, words -or short combinations of words- stand for the units of semantic contents, with (almost) unequivocal correspondence with objects and concepts. Moreover, in the symbolic representation of language as a chain of characters, i.e. as a written text, words are separated by blank spaces and punctuation marks, which facilitates their identification -in particular, by automatic means. Music, on the other hand, does not possess any conventionally defined units of meaning. The notion of word is however conceivable in music by comparison with the linguistic role of words as "units of context," namely, as the perceptual elements whose collective function yields coherence and comprehensibility to a message. In music, the role of "units of context" is played by the building blocks of the patterns which, at different time scales, make the musical message intelligible. Yet, the identification of such units in a specific work may constitute a controversial task.

In the quantitative investigation of context creation in music, I have chosen as "units of context" the building blocks of the smallest-scale patterns, namely, single notes. A note is here characterised by its pitch (i.e. its position on the clef-endowed staff) and type (i.e. its duration relative to the tempo mark), and its volume, timbre, and actual frequency and duration are disregarded. The contribution of notes to the creation of musical context, determining tonality and the basis for rhythm, is particularly transparent. In addition, the choice of single notes has several operational advantages. In the first place, the collection of notes available to all musical compositions -or, at least, to all those compositions that can be written on a staff using the standard note types- is the same. This collection of notes plays the role of the lexicon out of which the message is generated. Secondly, single notes are well-defined entities in any symbolic representation of music, either printed on a staff or in standardised digital formats, such as the Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI). This makes possible their automatic identification, which, as described later, constitutes a crucial step in the analysis. Moreover, in order to extract any meaningful information from a statistical approach, it is necessary to work with relatively large corpora. The compositions used in the present investigation contain, typically, several thousand single notes. This figure remains well below the number of words in any literary corpus, which usually reaches a few hundred thousands (cf. figure 1), but is already suited for statistical manipulations.

Re:Smallest unit of musical meaning

[teamhasnoi]

I had to reply because I was reminded of a story of one note.

"(Don't call me Kid)" Jonny Lang and B.B. King were playing a show together at some state fair. B.B calls Jonny up during B.B.'s set to do a song together.

The song gets to the solo part and B.B. motions for Jonny to take the lead.

Jonny kicks out all the stops and plays a blistering solo that shows he's at the top of his game, he's out of his mind - he's damn good. He's doing bends, he's sliding all over, he's sweating with exertion and feeling.

Now it's B.B.'s turn.

B.B. closes his eyes, leans back -

And plays one note. And keeps playing it. With every bit of blues that ever happened to anyone all in that one note.

The crowd goes mad screaming.

Jonny got schooled. :)

Re:Odd

[kfg]

The nuance of spoken language is at least as important as the content of what's being said.

And anyone who doesn't get this should try to find a recording of Robert Morely or Peter Ustinov reading something. Fan-bloody-tastic.

For those not willing to take the effort, or who cannot find such a recording, you can at least rent the movie Arthur and just listen to John Gielgud, or Ghandi and listen to John Gielgud and Ben Kingsley, or Lawrence of Arabia and listen to Peter O'Toole, Alec Guiness, Anthony Quinn, Omar Sharif, Jack Hawkins, Jose Ferrer, Arthur Kennedy, Anthony Quayle and Claude Raines.

Turn off the picture and just listen to the music in the voices of that one.

KFG

similarity between music and language

[belmolis]

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.

music as a language

[miles zarathustra]

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.

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 ... and the fact that it works emotionally is remarkable when you understand how entirely artificial it is.

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.

The Greeks

[Tarantolato]

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.

Basic math wins!

[RoufTop]

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. ;-)

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 / .5x would come next (octaves), followed by 3x/2 (the dominant) and 4x / 3 (subdominant)... until you get to that nasty tritone.

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

Fractal Math

[serutan]

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.

Research Validated

[superyooser]

Once the author introduced "sausage" into the discourse by this community reading his article, the fact that we see it repeated is only validation of Zipf's point. Slashdot is creating a "song" from this story, and sausage has become part of its "key."

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.

Re:Research Validated

[fucksl4shd0t]

If you're a musician, you know that excessive accidentals make the specified key pointless and virtually nonexistent.

That's generally referred to as jazz.

But when you do it on purpose, it's called heavy metal.

And when you do it on accident and then claim it's on purpose, it's called rock'n'roll.

But if you don't do it at all, it's called crap. ;)

Sausages and the meaning of it all

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

What the study really says

[bw5353]

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."

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.

Jazz musicians know this...

[ThreeToe]

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.

Re:uses of the word

[mikeage]

I saw a letter to the editor from US News in which someone commented on a sentence he heard back in WW2 from an airplane mechanic:

Fuck! Fuck this fucking fuck!

The writer noted how he was impressed that in 5 words he could use 4 fucks, each a different part of speech.

Solresol was a real music language

[elgatozorbas]

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

Z

Re:Odd

[IngramJames]

On an interesting and related note (ahem): The Clangers. A BBC tv children's programme in which the characters communicated entirely by whistles.

The whistles were blown by actors, using a script. When they aired the show, they found people writing in saying "my child insists the characters said X, Y and Z" - is he mad?

The thing is, the kids usually got it spot on.

Lucky they took out the swearing in the original script, then. Also of note is the final paragrah in that link, which says:

I took an episode of The Clangers to the 1984 E.B.U.
conference in Germany and showed it to the participants without my voice-
over. Afterwards I asked them whether they had been able to understand
what the Clangers were saying.
"But of course." they replied. "They are speaking perfect German."
"But no." said Gerd, "That is not so. They spoke only Swedish,"