music as language

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 [BROKEN LINK: chess_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