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Music is a language, or rather a type of language. Depending on the culture, it has 5 or 12 symbols (tones), and each musical culture has its grammatical struct

by seri4l 4y ago

Music is a language, or rather a type of language. Depending on the culture, it has 5 or 12 symbols (tones), and each musical culture has its grammatical structure: in Western music most sequential 8 symbol arrangements are gibberish, others convey different emotions, most of those sequences don't go well together, some do and so on. It's a development of the ancient language we use to communicate mood and intent by varying the pitch and rhythm of voice while speaking. Useless to transmit concepts, but excellent to transmit emotions.

pbhjpbhj 4y ago
In general there's no way to distinguish between: I'm mad (crazy), I'm constipated, I'm angry, babbling (playing random notes), [a sequence of notes played for the disharmony itself], ... there's not sufficient agreement in meaning to be a language.
- scrollaway 4y ago
  I think you're incorrect. Even just thinking on the surface about this assertion, it doesn't hold up. Music can communicate a lot, and I think a better musician than me would likely be able to find you appropriate arrangements for all those things you mentioned. If music is a language, it is certainly one that developed very very differently, by virtue of not being used to communicate ideas but rather emotions. But there's some crazy languages out there, and the first ones that come to mind which can absolutely debunk what you said are these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whistled_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whistled_language But, there needs to be "agreement" in the meaning to make it a language of course. So the first four notes of symphony number 5 might not communicate something common to everybody who hears it, but neither does the sound "love" (/lʌv/) universally communicate the emotion of love. (Nor does it even in english; if I tell you "I love this weather", "I love my girlfriend" and "Of course I love walking on lego", that sound communicates extremely different things)
  - pbhjpbhj 4y ago
    Whistled language is a language, for sure, but it seems a stretch to say it's music. If you're doing that then you may as well just say vocalised languages are music. Your examples on ambiguity are poor IMO, there's a huge class difference between whether a passage of a symphony conveys linguistic meaning and the relatively small variance of interpretation of "love" for a single one of your examples. Also, we know the difference (in general) between those three uses of "love" (romantic, appreciative, sarcastic) from the context; you do get context in music but it suffers even more from wide variance in interpretation. Prokofiev's 'Peter and the Wolf' is a great example of musical narrative but the passages portray a generalized emotion rather than language. Is Peter happy in the main theme, or just relaxed, maybe ignorant?
kqr 4y ago
It well be a language depending on how you define language, but the hypothesis I'm talking about rests on the assumption that most (Western) music is repetitive enough and with a small "vocabulary" enough to be uninteresting to newborns, and certainly not heard as a language simply because of the lack of variation. (Some pop music is worse than other types in this regard.)

by seri4l 4y ago

pbhjpbhj 4y ago

In general there's no way to distinguish between: I'm mad (crazy), I'm constipated, I'm angry, babbling (playing random notes), [a sequence of notes played for the disharmony itself], ... there's not sufficient agreement in meaning to be a language.

scrollaway 4y ago
I think you're incorrect. Even just thinking on the surface about this assertion, it doesn't hold up. Music can communicate a lot, and I think a better musician than me would likely be able to find you appropriate arrangements for all those things you mentioned. If music is a language, it is certainly one that developed very very differently, by virtue of not being used to communicate ideas but rather emotions. But there's some crazy languages out there, and the first ones that come to mind which can absolutely debunk what you said are these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whistled_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whistled_language But, there needs to be "agreement" in the meaning to make it a language of course. So the first four notes of symphony number 5 might not communicate something common to everybody who hears it, but neither does the sound "love" (/lʌv/) universally communicate the emotion of love. (Nor does it even in english; if I tell you "I love this weather", "I love my girlfriend" and "Of course I love walking on lego", that sound communicates extremely different things)
- pbhjpbhj 4y ago
  Whistled language is a language, for sure, but it seems a stretch to say it's music. If you're doing that then you may as well just say vocalised languages are music. Your examples on ambiguity are poor IMO, there's a huge class difference between whether a passage of a symphony conveys linguistic meaning and the relatively small variance of interpretation of "love" for a single one of your examples. Also, we know the difference (in general) between those three uses of "love" (romantic, appreciative, sarcastic) from the context; you do get context in music but it suffers even more from wide variance in interpretation. Prokofiev's 'Peter and the Wolf' is a great example of musical narrative but the passages portray a generalized emotion rather than language. Is Peter happy in the main theme, or just relaxed, maybe ignorant?

kqr 4y ago

It well be a language depending on how you define language, but the hypothesis I'm talking about rests on the assumption that most (Western) music is repetitive enough and with a small "vocabulary" enough to be uninteresting to newborns, and certainly not heard as a language simply because of the lack of variation. (Some pop music is worse than other types in this regard.)