Language coded into music: is it possible?

Factual Questions
1

OK, now this is a question for the musically-inclined, and those who generally know more about music theory (and perhaps mathematics and linguistics) than I do.

Now, I was wondering if it would be possible to code language into a musical form, one based on notes, intervals, pitches, and so on. That said, if it were possible, how would it work? One person I asked about it said that it would probably be based on intervals. Part of me thinks that it would involve clicks and whistles, and wonders if this isn’t the result of being forced to watch “Crazy Safari”, one day. However, that movie and the hopping Chinese vampire therein is besides the point.

So yeah, any ideas? Or is this just silly?
bamf

2

What’s your definition of music, and why do you think language currently is not music?

3

You mean like Silbo?

4

It obviously entirely depends on what you mean by “into a musical form”. Obviously, it’s simple to transfer letters, or syllables, to representative pitches, rhythms, etc. But all you end up with is a new version of Morse code. The problem here is that you’re only representing the sounds of language, not the meaning of words and sentences. And you’re creating a series of sounds, but without any linear or harmonic structure independent of the words, and so it really fails to fulfil most definitions of ‘music’.

I guess what you might really be asking is whether it’s possible to convey linguistic meaning by musical sounds. And it’s a question which has been asked the other way around by many music scholars - i.e., does music have some intrinsically linguistic trait? One offshoot has been the application of semiotics to music analysis - Semiotics for Beginners give you an idea of the kind of things that have resulted (although it’s not really a site suitable for newcomers to music analysis!) I personally have a love-hate relationship with semiotics being used in application to music - I feel that to look for inherent ‘meaning’ is to miss the point entirely, that music doesn’t need to have a message, or to say somthing, but that it works at a more fundamental level. Anyway, I’m rambling slightly off the topic…

5

The question seems to me to be “Could you, by purely tonal means, convey the same depth of meaning as in spoken language?”

This question actually has no factual answer. It has not been done to any extensively effective degree, and some people have tried, but that doens’t necessarily mean it CAN’T

Richard Strauss, of “Also Sprach Zarathustra” (aka 2001) fame, was very keen on the idea himself. He reportedly once longed, for example, to write a passage that, when heard, would immediately call to mind the image of a spoon resting on a wooden table, something he never achieved, AFAIK.

The compromise was called “program music”. The music would try to be as evocative as it could, and notes included in the program would be the listener’s guide to what imagery was being attempted.

Two anecdotes relating to this:

Back in the 1980s, I taped some music I wanted a bandmate to hear, on a tape that happened to have my sister’s copy of Andreas Vollenweider’s “White Winds” album on the reverse side, with no notes or title or nothin’. My friend had flipped the tape over and listened to the album, and asked me about it. In particular, he wanted to know about a passage right at the beginning of the album, which made him feel like he was watching a movie where the camera was panning over open water, when suddenly a white ship sails into frame. The passage’s title on the album? “The White Ship (First View)”.

In the 1990s, some friends and I attended a concert of new compositions at the Tsai Performance Center at Boston University. It included a piece of program music, which said that the first part of the piece was meant to evoke the image of a pale, bare tree on a hill seen against a cloudy sky. Jaded as we all were to the self-aggrandizing claims of modern composers, we began to listen with low expectations. Afterwards, while chairs and music stands were being rearranged for the next selection, my friends and I all marvelled at how evocative it had been. The music had achieved Strauss’ ambitions. We could all see the tree in our minds, and all at the same moments had had our attention drawn from the trunk to the main branches to the tiniest leafless twigs at the fringes of the tree. We were all quite floored, and overheard other concertgoers expressing the same amazement. As we were discussing this, a representative from the organizers of the concert came on stage and apologized. There had been a program misprint, and the order of the pieces as printed was not correct. The piece we had just listened to was not the program piece, but the one listed after it. NOW we would here the piece about the tree, which was very disappointingly non-evocative in comparison.

So there’s some ways to go in our knowledge of this, I’d say.

6

That’s a wonderful anecdote, scotandrsn! - and it demonstrates one of the flaws of programme music, in that it has a reliance on extra-musical influences to achieve its supposed communicative powers.

And depicting a spoon on a table would be relatively easy. The real challenge would be to communicate ideas that cannot be conveyed by any other means (a picture of a spoon on a table conveys Strauss’ example quite easily!)

Try imagining a piece of music, for example, that explains the complexity of climate change, or tells us exactly why you love your spouse, or exactly conveys how it feels to be tickled, and so on…

7

Am I on everyone’s ignore list? There’s a whistling language already in existence. It’s been around for thousands of years. It works. What else are you looking for in a “musical language”?

8

I think maybe y’all are missing something.

The sounds I make when I talk are just arbitrary noises. They don’t inherently mean spit. If you doubt that, play a tape of my speech to a Chinese person who’s never heard American. He’ll hear the exact same sounds you would hear, but he’ll hear none of the meaning. The meaning is in our shared understanding of English (or not), not in the sounds themsleves.

What’s “music”? At bottom, it’s sounds. If we all agreed that a quarter note of A above middle C meant the same thing as the sound “KAT” in American, etc., then yes, you could construct sentences in music and use them to communicate. But, just like in American, that requires that we agree beforehand to tie the mental concept of fuzzy domesticated purring animal to our chosen audio symbol.

The idea that “KAT” has inherent meaning or that a quarter note of A above middle C has inherent meaning is just baseless.

Some words, and some musical sounds, have a soft connection to their corresponding concept. Most languages have a word kind of like English “boom”, to describe a sudden loud noise. But these words are few & far between, and a lot less standardized across languages whan you’d expect.

Here’s a recent thread on a related topic http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=287184

9

That’s what my whole post about semiotics was describing - the question of how that spit ends up meaning somthing?

10

Richard Strauss, of “Also Sprach Zarathustra” (aka 2001) fame, was very keen on the idea himself. He reportedly once longed, for example, to write a passage that, when heard, would immediately call to mind the image of a spoon resting on a wooden table, something he never achieved, AFAIK.

Well, Strauss never dropped acid.

Anyway, in the same vein, Bach does conjure up some specific & interesting synaesthesia.