LINGUIST ARGUE THAT MUSIC IS ANOTHER LANGUAGE, SO HOW CAN YOU FLUENTLY RELATE TO IT?

February 21, 2020

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote, “Music is the universal language of mankind.”

I believe this is undoubtedly true. In my 4 years of teaching music technology and piano classes, over 7 years of tutoring for music courses, and 16 years of playing piano and studying music theory, I do believe music is a language that every person is capable of understanding no matter what linguistic language they speak fluently. This means rather I accompany a person who speaks Japanese or a person who speaks German; they can read and play my piece just the same as I could speaking English fluently, and likewise improvise with me based on their emotional instinct for sound and touch as well.

So if this is the case, what music qualities and abilities can be shared virtually among all societies, and how can we know for sure why our brains become in sync with the music of others when not emotionally explained?

These questions were answered by researchers Samuel Mehr, a fellow of the Harvard Data Science Initiative and research associate in psychology, Manvir Singh, a graduate student in Harvard's department of Human Evolutionary Biology, and Luke Glowacki, formerly a Harvard graduate student and now a professor of anthropology at Pennsylvania State University. Mehr, Singh, and Glowacki developed an experiment over a 5 year period to test thousands of individuals on their sensory likeness.

According to the Harvard study, these researchers created and used a database of thousands of music reels representing 30 geographic regions worldwide; to assess the variables that affected their results such as: singers and audience members, the time of day, duration of singing, the presence of instruments, and more details for thousands of passages about songs in the ethnographic corpus. The discography was then analyzed using machine summaries, listener ratings, expert annotations, and expert transcriptions for a final result.

Mehr expressed, “In music theory, tonality is often assumed to be an invention of Western music, but our data raise the controversial possibility that this could be a universal feature of music,” he said. “That raises pressing questions about structure that underlies music everywhere — and whether and how our minds are designed to make music.”

Music is a system that allows for two separate identities to connect regardless of background, or Deficiencies. Just like most things that are of great value, I find that the language of music is sustained. This means, the characters will always be identical and understandable no matter where you go. According to Singh, the same understanding was analyzed in their research.

"We show that our shared psychology produces fundamental patterns in song that transcend our profound cultural differences," adds co-first author of the study Manvir Singh, also at Harvard. "This suggests that our emotional and behavioral responses to aesthetic stimuli are remarkably similar across widely diverging populations."

And for this reason, I observe that music is the most comprehensive way to connect with someone from a different background, or culture, by simply listening and understanding the ambivalent emotions written on their sheet.

Author Mary Todd Bergman summarized the researches results by saying, "They found that, across societies, music is associated with behaviors such as infant care, healing, dance, and love (among many others, like mourning, warfare, processions and ritual), and that these behaviors are not terribly different from society to society. Examining lullabies, healing songs, dance songs, and love songs in particular, they discovered that songs that share behavioral functions tend to have similar musical features."

When listening to music we don't need to comprehend the dialect coming from the performer's mouth (if they are a singer). We can have this interaction of different existences simply by connecting to the instruments that support the main voice, and the way those instruments manipulate volume, pitch, durations, and timbre. According to theorist Chris Dobrian, music can be classified as an emotional communication but in the sense of having a linguistic meaning it lacks syntax structure and semantics.

"Because music is a stimulus to our sense of hearing, it is clear that music can, and inevitably does, convey information...My own belief is that all music has an expressive power, some more and some less, but that all music has a certain meaning behind the notes and that that meaning behind the notes constitutes, after all, what the piece is saying, what the piece is about. This whole problem can be stated quite simply by asking, "Is there a meaning to music?" My answer to that would be, "Yes." And "Can you state in so many words what the meaning is?" My answer to that would be, "No." Therein lies the difficulty….Within the orbit of tonality, composers have always been bound by certain expressive laws of the medium, laws which are analogous to those of language..., since notes, like words, have emotional connotations....Music functions as a language of the emotions," (Dobrian).

Furthermore when it comes to reading the notation of music, it is evident that no matter who you learn the symbols of music from; it will always be the same in counting, patterns, and beats worldwide.

This can be best explained by surgeon Mark Kirsby who uses Jazz player Charles Limb as reference to view the connection of speech nerves in the brain to musical understanding. "In the brains of jazz musicians who are engaged with other musicians in spontaneous improvisation show robust activation in the same brain areas traditionally associated with spoken language and syntax. In other words, improvisational jazz conversations 'Take root in the brain as a language,' Limb said." It's as simple as this, "When you're talking about something, you're not thinking about how your mouth is moving and you're not thinking about how the words are spelled and you're not thinking about grammar. With music, it's the same thing..."(Limb).

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Defense:

https://phys.org/news/2018-01-music-universal-language.html

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2019/11/new-harvard-study-establishes-music-is-universal/

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2019-11/hu-miu111719.php

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Offense:

https://music.arts.uci.edu/dobrian/CD.music.lang.htm#as

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/why-music-not-universal-language-180968245/

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/02/how-brains-see-music-as-language/283936/