The Music of Language (Book)
Songs are danced speech.--Alan Lomax
[Updated 10/12/2025, Note on 38]
The Music of Language is a compilation of writings over the past decade on the connection between language and music. I'm in the camp of musicians who believe that music preceded language. I always understood it intuitively, and then later on it became more of a passionate intellectual pursuit.
At the back of the book, as the appendix are what I’m calling “wordrums” (a portmanteau of “word” and “drum”), where the inherent rhythms in natural speech become musical and become seeds for the music. In the past, it was customary for songwriters to start with a title, and the title would have some kind of a rhythmic pattern to it, which would be the basis for the entire song. I still like to work this way.
An AI-generated summary/analysis:
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Playlist of Examples:
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Footnotes:
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shave_and_a_Haircut
2. Ivo Popasov, “Bulchenska Ratchenitsa (Bride’s Ratchenitsa)”
3. https://youtu.be/RRmq5EKSmTg?si=sGkttV4B2B07LKzv
4. https://youtu.be/4HX5-ulcdXc?si=SYOqALn8s6kjW8ak
5. https://youtu.be/U2-KgBhslBQ?si=jUKBzdXl7yKQMoHy
6. https://youtu.be/TYqrXVNfYUI?si=Y-yZG_obIUKrMI5I&t=375
7. https://youtu.be/dou3aSZmEg0?si=oPYGrwmzkMzcOxkj&t=2245
8. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Slang_by_decade
9. https://musescore.com/user/30768085/scores/25999516/s/DJF8Kn?share=copy_link
10. (Mithen, Steven. The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind and Body. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2007. 149)
11. https://youtu.be/GYM_0TPEttI?si=4nyPw6-ubpYLKhjY
12. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/02/06/opinion/trump-speech-mental-capacity.html
13. Bergen, Benjamin K. Louder Than Words: The New Science of How the Mind
Makes Meaning. New York, NY: Basic Books, 2012. Print., pp.82-86
14. https://soundcloud.com/chilee/it-was-all-just-a-dream/s-8Ha6vOIuCZq
15. http://nautil.us/issue/30/identity/drums-lies-and-audiotape
16. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-54772218
17. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contrafactum
18. Burlingame, Jon. The Music of James Bond. United Kingdom, OUP USA, 2012.
19. https://www.wsj.com/articles/david-byrne-and-talking-heads-on-burning-down-the-house-11594042472
20. https://interlude.hk/charles-baudelaire-1821-1867-i-have-cultivated-my-hysteria-with-pleasure-and-terror/
21. https://aeon.co/essays/machine-writing-is-closer-to-literatures-history-than-you-know
22. https://youtu.be/oDFuIIwG1M4?si=qs9C8bI5i-eULa-8
23. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8n51xlrMy8&t=1636s
24. https://leebarry1.bandcamp.com/track/dying-to-connect-some-august
25. https://youtu.be/bFkpRel59eU?si=L_hirRdoUYlINQc-
26. https://youtube.com/shorts/OE9E9r773D4?si=0Sw00wp0IOC5CpjQ
27. The technical term for words that “smear” across each other is an oronym--e.g, “an ice water”/”a nice water”. Typically there is one variation that is nonsense. In pop music, nonsense wordplay is more possible because the meaning might be intentionally vague.
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Postscripts:
01
"If you were to distill the essence of language, you’d come up with something resembling poetry or music; it reduces language to concepts, ideas and symbols—and leaves just enough ambiguity to fill in the spaces with stories about the culture, expressed with “heart” or “soul”. It was this terse approach to language that made Mark Twain so popular, and such a seminal force in American literature. It had a vocal quality that spoke of common experience and of simple values; and addressed difficult social issues with wit, stripping away the pompousness in favor of an easy-going vernacular."
From The Boss isn’t who I thought he was:
"It uses rhyme in an improvisatory rather than mechanical way, as much modern poetry does. It describes a situation with a high degree of emotional specificity, including somehow finding warmth in the news that the person the song is addressing is not beautiful. Its accurate transcription of the way people actually talk is a kind of art in itself, reminiscent of how precisely Elmore Leonard got down the structures and cadences of colloquial English."
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[9/25/2025]
"...A good example for the genre-specific usage of prosody is rhythm in Afro-American rhetoric. In an important article written on this topic in the tradition of ethnography of communication, Gumperz (1978) analyzes the rhetoric of a Afro-American Protestant sermon to show that the traditional concept of a dialect (which includes segmental-phonological and grammatical categories only) is not sufficient to capture the discourse structure of the speech event under discussion. The elegance and complexity of the event becomes visible only when prosodic features are taken into account, and particularly when their role in the various modes of participation uniting the preacher and the audience are seen. Instead of waiting for the audience’s “Amen’s”, “Halleluyah’s”, and “Praise the Lord's" to die down, in order to begin, the minister actively joins the ongoing performance by repeatedly interpolating his own “Amen” and Praise the Lord in a rhythmically appropriate pause time with increasing emphasis. Having thus taken his place in the event, he repeats the theme of his sermon. His technique once more relies on rhythmic synchrony. A typical sermon begins with an invocation or introductory phase, which takes the form of dialogue-like interchanges representing the minister’s, God’s, and the audience’s words. There follows a transitional phase marked by increasing rhythmic intensity, increasingly frequent audience responses and occasional stylistic cross-overs in which content appropriate to one of the characters is spoken with the stylistic characteristics of the other. The final culminating phase has trance-like performance characteristics: heavy breathing, staccato delivery, hyperventilation..."From Language In Time
LLM Prompt: "Discuss the rhythmic nature of preaching"
03
Visualization of The Great Curve
10
A song lyric always has to dance with ambiguity. If you're tethered to the constraints of rhymes. meaning is a nice thing to have, but you won't always have clear meaning. Personally, I like for their to be ambiguities. I'd choose something singable as opposed to something that reads like prose. In songs, you can tell stories 2 ways--either directly, or indirectly through inference, or let the listener parse it out. Pop music is a "slang" or "dialect" of "proper" music or proper grammar.
"...languages can be used to keep outsiders in the dark, and any speaker will confirm that they are occasionally used that way. But this doesn't make them 'secret languages' in the sense that exclusion is their primary purpose. " Lingo: Around Europe in Sixty Languages
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What are the most frequently used slang words in pop music lyrics? (None of then are particularly musical like 'gotta' or 'hafta') "-Ing" isn't musical at all and hard to sing, except when it's 'singin'. https://www.perplexity.ai/search/what-are-the-most-frequently-u-FW.giQ9PTs.x9WbTpxAotg#0
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From Burning Down the House: "Among the many contrarian aspects of Eno's approach to record production was his inclination to reduce the prominence of vocals and lyrics in the overall musical mix. Generally speaking, he was much more interested in the sound of singing than in the meaning of what was being sung. His own compositional method, which he would later impart to David Byrne, was to record the music first and then sound out the words and melody by singing along repeatedly with the instrumental tracks." (198)
"One of the virtues that contributed to the impact,and influence of Remain in Light was the sheer breadth of its innovation. In addition to relying on Brian Eno's methodology of building up tracks in layers from a minimal rhythmic base, David Byrne experimented with an approach to. lyric writing based more on the way words felt and sounded than on what they actually meant, consciously resisting the impulse, as he would liter put it, to “make sense." In the case of "Houses in Motion," Byrne took the title and some of the lyrics from a radio sermon he heard." (270)
10, 22, 38
"Play with words and phrases and their meanings, and play with logical systems are the primary systematic means of ordering, communicating, and dealing with our experience of the world. Words, however exciting they may be at first discovery, go flat with use, becoming mechanical tags for the all-too-familiar. Language is a vast repository of petrified metaphors. To be evocative requires periodic renewal and reinvigoration." (125)
"Play with words and invigorates language and by implication reinvigorates perception as well as the way conceptions are formed. It reestablishes the wide range of metaphoric suggestiveness inherent not only in language as a whole but also in single words and phrases. We have all experienced the ways in which words, flatly employed as the name for things, are made to dispel the strange."
Gordon, William J. J. Synectics, the Development of Creative Capacity. New York: Harper, 1961. Print.
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Research suggests that for experienced singers (those at a certain level of proficiency), it is more effective to memorize both the lyrics and music simultaneously. In experimental conditions, participants were instructed never to separate the words and music, meaning if they read the words out loud, they should play the tune on the piano, and if they hummed the music, they should keep the words visible. LLM: "Discuss how words and music are used in the memorization process"
22
From the book Algospeak:
The “hood irony” meme genre is a microcosm of a larger effect: the problematic, underlying idea of Black culture being thought of as “funny.” Studies show that people tend to find it humorous when a word has a less familiar spelling or origin. That’s why there’s an element of comedy when the Terminator says, “Hasta la vista, baby,” or why English speakers sometimes jokingly say “adiós” or “no problemo” to each other. The same thing is happening with African American English language, which many white people find funny due to their lack of familiarity with it. The word “gyat,” for instance, reached social media as a funny word for “butt,” but it actually comes from an exaggerated AAE pronunciation of “goddamn.” Because the pronunciation was seen as amusing, it grew to be an ironic exclamation for seeing an attractive butt, eventually coming to serve as a noun for “butt” due to the association. By the point when it became internet brainrot slang”-“sticking out your gyat for the Rizzler”-the word had been stretched and diluted in a way that ultimately made a farce of its original use. What’s more, people have even created false etymologies for it: Two top results on Urban Dictionary claim that “gyat” stands for “girl you ate that” or “girl your ass thick.” These kinds of “backronyms” harmfully reduce knowledge of where words actually come from, but are unfortunately unavoidable with modern slang.
A similar example is the word “ahh” instead of ass, which was put on the map as part of the phrase “goofy ahh”.
In the early [2000s]. I worked with a singer once around that time who wrote a song lyric about that with that title.
[As fun as slang is it makes for poor communication and probably sows contempt. People don't like the feeling that they're being tricked or a joke is being played on them, in the way that some people have contempt for contemporary ("contemptorary") art, which is a form of slang as well, and has the same effect on people who understand art as being essentially aesthetic or decorative. You could make the assertion that slang is a manifestation of postmodernism, but it might actually just be a form of Dada, which is modernist, and is a reaction to what might be happening in society. It might be postmodernist in the sense that it has a "guerilla" vibe. With Dada it was WWI, and now it's myriad things that are collectively as disturbing. It's a way to have fun and be silly to let off steam, as well as to create new dialects, or "stylects". I sometimes use a form of algospeak to force pronunciations in AI-generated songs, for example "latay" "cafe late", otherwise it would pronounce it as "late". Sometimes the mispronunciations are amusing, such as "Lascaush" for "Lascaux", which in the patois of slang, could become one, such as "scosh".]
Musing On Music LLM: "Discuss Slang"
15,46
There's this very controversial new algorithm that Spotify has developed where it detects
emotions in voices. Apparently what they do is take the [prosody] of the voice and then they associate music with it. That's very interesting from a language standpoint because music and language are joined at the hip with the prosody in our individual voices, and can become melodic and can conceivably be mapped to MIDI data so you can take speech and convert it into notation with dynamics and articulations. But it probably wouldn't be very useful. There would be all kinds of weird syncopations and full of ties and weird note values, but it's a way to use standard music symbols with speech.
44
"Vocal cues are part of the broader category of subtle cues for identity that humans constantly use and interpret. These cues turn individuals into "walking billboards for our identity," providing significant information about group belonging, often without conscious recognition from the individual receiving the cue." (Book: The Human Swarm)
46
Knowledge is “ethereal” and might have existed for a long time. One of the things I’ve always said is that if it rhymes somebody has already thought of it and relates to the idea of the rhythms of language being involved in the dissemination of ideas. A song chorus is a dissemination of an idea–a meme. A ditty or short song is a meme. Memes erase individuality. One person can say that they thought of it but at that point, once it becomes a meme it doesn’t matter.
60
"...all languages prohibit certain combinations of consonants. Modern English doesn’t allow dv, for instance, while Czech does (think of the composer Dvorak). Nor does English allow kn, today, but the spelling of words like ‘knife’ indicates that it did in the past — and that both letters were once pronounced. At the time of the Slav migrations, most of the Balkan peninsula apart from Greece was Italic-speaking — having previously been claimed by the Romans — but the Slavs would have encountered pockets of East Germanic-speakers too. Italic forbade the combination dl, then, while Germanic barred kt and pt. As the Slavs conquered speakers of these languages, the vanquished started speaking Slavic, but they stumbled over words containing consonant combinations that were prohibited in their mother tongues. (Psychologists report that people don’t even hear the combinations that are forbidden in their native language; they hear the nearest pairing that’s allowed, which they then reproduce.) The result was that Slavic absorbed prohibitions from a number of foreign languages which, combined, forced out its closed syllables." Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global
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