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music as language
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music as language
Let’s try to set a foundation for music as language. Language is a combination of characters, glyphs, words, sentences, grammar… In music we do have multiple way of describing a piece but the analysis is more subjective and less structured as for languages. There are few things where one would profit in creating music by being able to describe it. Everywhere we find patterns we can construct a language chess as language
Die Grenzen meiner Sprachen bedeuten die Grenzen meiner Welt
-L. Wittgenstein
This is the sentence I grow up with.
components
Compared to languages music has a stronger dependency from context. The context brings significance to every note while in natural languages this dependency is weaker: a word mostly maintains its meaning independently on the context (less in Asiatic languages as I heard).
In music every note has a meaning only for a given scale, same for a phrase.
Components:
- pitch
- 12 pitches
- octave
- 4-5
- duration
- 1 2 4 8 16
- breaks
- 1 2 4 8 16
- chord
- IV, V, vi
- scale
- Cmaj, Dmin, Esus
- dynamic
- forte, piano, pianissimo
- tempo
- andante, moderato
- signature
- 4/4, 3/4, 6/8
- sync
- on-beat, off beat
- accent
- rhythm
meaning
Now let’s try to abstract a bit the matter. Let’s say we can define a context where some components get a meaning. Some example:
- grade
- for a given scale each note has resolution expectancy (tonic, dominant, sensitive…)
- rhythm
- each genre/dance has a expected rhythmical pattern (valzer, polka, mazurka, dancehall,…)
- chords
- each chord has a role in a progression (suspense, tension, resolution, …)
- key change
- evolution, outlook
- phrase
- the melodic evolution
We start expressing something the moment we start putting elements that mean something within the context. The typical language used to describe it is pretty basic and can be expanded a lot: suspension, resolution, tension, predictable, romantic, sad… This is a pretty basic language to describe the complexity of music.
grammar
The interesting part is now to define some grammar elements to define the key functions. This is not trivial since we don’t have a unique map between the two.
- character
- it can be a combination of pitch, duration and octave
- phrase
- a melodic line?
- syntactic function (role)
- is there a concept like verb, subject, adjective, object?
- morphology (behavior)
- predicate
- arguments
- syntax