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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!
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.
First time i've seen a comment consisting roughly only of the word "Sausage" being modded insightful, and is actually on topic!
^_^
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.
Apple has never claimed not to be evil, they're just very stylish about it.
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.
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.
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?
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
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.
*****
Dear Mary,
I yearn for you tragically,
A.T. Tappman, Chaplain, U.S. Army.
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.
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.
M.
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.
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.
I belong to the ______ generation.
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.
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
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,"
'No rational religion claims "supernatural" exists, that's an atheist slander.' - seen on slashdot.
sounds more like it was brought to you by the letters T, H, and C
"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.