The Music of Language (Book)

 

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." 

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) 

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)

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