scholarly journals Creativity Parallels between Language and Music

2018 ◽  
Vol 66 (3) ◽  
pp. 371-380 ◽  
Author(s):  
Graeme Trousdale
Keyword(s):  
Music And Language ◽  
Musical Structures ◽  
Language And Music ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Musical Change

Abstract This article explores possible connections between language, music and creativity, particularly in terms of change in linguistic and musical grammars. It considers parallels between properties of usage-based grammars (like chunking and schematicity) and musical structures. While some research into the relationship between music and language has tended to align itself more with formal approaches to knowledge about language, the discussion here is more focussed on functional, usage-based approaches. The article sets out some ways in which work on musical change might be used to think about parallels between language and music, and how this connects to creativity.

Prosody, melody and rhythm in vocal music

2015 ◽  
Vol 32 ◽  
pp. 116-129
Author(s):  
Teresa Proto
Keyword(s):  
Vocal Music ◽  
Wide Audience ◽  
Musical Structures ◽  
Language And Music ◽  
Scientific Approach ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Further Development ◽  
Linguistic Material

The last decades have witnessed a shift from anecdotal remarks concerning the “marriage” of music and lyrics in songs towards a more scientific approach to the matter. Textsetting has thus become the object of more formal analyses accounting for the regularities observed in individual singing traditions with regard to the mapping of linguistic material on musical structures. This paper illustrates the nature of the problem and reflects the status of the research on textsetting in living traditions. It is addressed to a wide audience of linguists interested in the relationship between language and music and points to the challenges that await the further development of this field of studies under the umbrella of linguistics.

Zum Verhältnis von Musik und Sprache in der griechischen Antike

Rhetorik ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Elvers
Keyword(s):  
Intimate Relationship ◽  
Common Goal ◽  
Shared Resources ◽  
Music And Language ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Musical Rhetoric ◽  
Language And Music ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Point Of Reference

AbstractIn this paper I discuss the relationship of music and language as it was conceived in Greek antiquity. More specifically, I focus on central passages from the corpora of Plato and Aristotle that are concerned with the theory of the arts. I claim that under the notion of μουσική (mousiké) both Aristotle and Plato understood language and music as two modalities of the same kind of artistic (or »aesthetic«) communication. Both modalities typically appear combined, as in the case of song or drama, serving as two different means to achieve a common goal: the accurate depiction of affections, as well as the appropriate elicitation of these in the perceiver. This implies that typically both modalities are interdependent and complementing each other. Further, subsuming both language and music under the notion of μουσική supports the idea of shared resources and foundations between the two modalities, which is a necessary prerequisite for any musical rhetoric. Although the notion of musical rhetoric in antiquity did not exist as such, the intimate relationship of music and language laid ground and served as an important point of reference for later scholars, who worked towards elaborated forms of a musical rhetoric.

scholarly journals Processing structure in language and music: a case for shared reliance on cognitive control

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
L. Robert Slevc ◽  
Brooke M. Okada
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Control ◽  
Resource Sharing ◽  
Cognitive Resources ◽  
Prefrontal Cortical ◽  
Music And Language ◽  
Language And Music ◽  
Resource Hypothesis ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Musical Elements ◽  
Structural Processing

The relationship between structural processing in music and language has received increasing interest in the last several years, spurred by the influential Shared Syntactic Integration Resource Hypothesis (SSIRH; Patel, 2003). According to this resource-sharing framework, music and language rely on separable syntactic representations but recruit shared cognitive resources to integrate these representations into evolving structures. The SSIRH is supported by findings of interactions between structural manipulations in music and language. However, other recent evidence suggests that such interactions can also arise with non-structural manipulations, and some recent neuroimaging studies report largely non-overlapping neural regions involved in processing musical and linguistic structure. These conflicting results raise the question of exactly what shared (and distinct) resources underlie musical and linguistic structural processing. This paper suggests that one shared resource is prefrontal cortical mechanisms of cognitive control, which are recruited to detect and resolve conflict that occurs when expectations are violated and interpretations must be revised. By this account, musical processing involves not just the incremental processing and integration of musical elements as they occur, but also the incremental generation of musical predictions and expectations, which must sometimes be overridden and revised in light of evolving musical input.

Prologue: Music and language

After Debussy ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
Julian Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Music And Language ◽  
Language And Music ◽  
Way Of Thinking ◽  
French Composers ◽  
The Relationship

The Prologue explores the tension between language and music and the place that musicology might occupy as a way of thinking through that tension. Rather than collapsing this difference into the assumption that language deals adequately with music or that, conversely, music remains ineffable to language, the relationship is explored as one of non-identity that is mutually constitutive – in other words, that we understand both music and language better through an exploration of their non-identical proximity. Music is taken here to mount a challenge to philosophy – specifically, that music embodies a kind of thinking through particularity rather than thinking through the abstraction of the concept. It sets out the rationale for a musical focus on Debussy and later French composers, and a parallel exploration of French writers from Mallarmé and Bergson to Derrida and Nancy.

SPEECH INTONATION PERCEPTION DEFICITS IN MUSICAL TONE DEAFNESS (CONGENITAL AMUSIA)

2008 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 357-368 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANIRUDDH D. PATEL ◽  
MEREDITH WONG ◽  
JESSICA FOXTON ◽  
ALIETTE LOCHY ◽  
ISABELLE PERETZ
Keyword(s):  
Rate Of Change ◽  
Neural Mechanisms ◽  
French Canadian ◽  
Congenital Amusia ◽  
Music And Language ◽  
Pitch Direction ◽  
Melody Perception ◽  
Language And Music ◽  
Musical Tone ◽  
Important Evidence

TO WHAT EXTENT DO MUSIC and language share neural mechanisms for processing pitch patterns? Musical tone-deafness (amusia) provides important evidence on this question. Amusics have problems with musical melody perception, yet early work suggested that they had no problems with the perception of speech intonation (Ayotte, Peretz, & Hyde, 2002). However, here we show that about 30% of amusics from independent studies (British and French-Canadian) have difficulty discriminating a statement from a question on the basis of a final pitch fall or rise. This suggests that pitch direction perception deficits in amusia (known from previous psychophysical work) can extend to speech. For British amusics, the direction deficit is related to the rate of change of the final pitch glide in statements/ questions, with increased discrimination difficulty when rates are relatively slow. These findings suggest that amusia provides a useful window on the neural relations between melodic processing in language and music.

The Role of Musical Development in Early Language Acquisition

2018 ◽  
pp. 565-591
Author(s):  
Anthony Brandt ◽  
L. Robert Slevc ◽  
Molly Gebrian
Keyword(s):  
Language Acquisition ◽  
Cultural Transmission ◽  
Developmental Disorders ◽  
Native Language ◽  
Current Understanding ◽  
Early Language ◽  
Music And Language ◽  
Language And Music ◽  
Infant Brain

Language and music are readily distinguished by adults, but there is growing evidence that infants first experience speech as a special type of music. By listening to the phonemic inventory and prosodic patterns of their caregivers’ speech, infants learn how their native language is composed, later bootstrapping referential meaning onto this musical framework. Our current understanding of infants’ sensitivities to the musical features of speech, the co-development of musical and linguistic abilities, and shared developmental disorders, supports the view that music and language are deeply entangled in the infant brain and modularity emerges over the course of development. This early entanglement of music and language is crucial to the cultural transmission of language and children’s ability to learn any of the world’s tongues.

The Effect of Familiarity on Neural Representations of Music and Language

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Avital Sternin ◽  
Lucy M. McGarry ◽  
Adrian M. Owen ◽  
Jessica A. Grahn
Keyword(s):  
Language Processing ◽  
Instrumental Music ◽  
Training Period ◽  
Neural Representations ◽  
Music And Language ◽  
Brain Responses ◽  
Language And Music ◽  
Before And After ◽  
Musical Memory ◽  
The Brain

Abstract We investigated how familiarity alters music and language processing in the brain. We used fMRI to measure brain responses before and after participants were familiarized with novel music and language stimuli. To manipulate the presence of language and music in the stimuli, there were four conditions: (1) whole music (music and words together), (2) instrumental music (no words), (3) a capella music (sung words, no instruments), and (4) spoken words. To manipulate participants' familiarity with the stimuli, we used novel stimuli and a familiarization paradigm designed to mimic “natural” exposure, while controlling for autobiographical memory confounds. Participants completed two fMRI scans that were separated by a stimulus training period. Behaviorally, participants learned the stimuli over the training period. However, there were no significant neural differences between the familiar and unfamiliar stimuli in either univariate or multivariate analyses. There were differences in neural activity in frontal and temporal regions based on the presence of language in the stimuli, and these differences replicated across the two scanning sessions. These results indicate that the way we engage with music is important for creating a memory of that music, and these aspects, over and above familiarity on its own, may be responsible for the robust nature of musical memory in the presence of neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer's disease.

Desire and distance in Kaija Saariaho's Lonh

2003 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 71-84 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Sivuoja-Gunaratnam
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Values ◽  
The Self ◽  
Environmental Sounds ◽  
Feminine Subjectivity ◽  
Love Stories ◽  
Language And Music ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Narrative Convention ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

This article explores the relationship of desire and distance in Kaija Saariaho's Lonh (1996) for soprano and electronics. The subject matter of Lonh is desire and romantic pleasures, anchored to feminine subjectivity, represented on stage by a soprano singer. Electronics provide the environmental sounds and amplify the singer's voice. Through Lonh looms a medieval song in the Occitan language, ‘Lanquan li jorn son lonc en mai’ by Jaufré Rudel, a famous troubadour in twelfth-century Provence. Saariaho reverses the narrative convention of love stories by presenting the most intimate encounter at the very beginning. In their succeeding encounters, the lovers move further away from each other. Similarly, in the course of Lonh the distance to Jaufré's song also increases. Luce Irigaray's concepts of love are used for an analysis of the relationship of the loving pair. By the end of Lonh the borderlines of speaking, singing, electronics, language and music collapse in Barthesian jouissance (bliss). The electronic technology in Lonh enables the re-investiture of cultural values, and the construction of flexible identities, crossing boundaries between the self and the other.

Embodiology

2019 ◽  
pp. 762-784
Author(s):  
S. Ama Wray
Keyword(s):  
West Africa ◽  
African Diaspora ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
West African ◽  
Performance Practices ◽  
Training Methodology ◽  
Music And Language ◽  
African Perspective ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Aesthetic Values

Dance-drumming performance practices in West Africa reveal multiple modes of communication that take place between performers and informed audiences, in an ongoing exchange of novelty. In the Ewe case, the critical nature of the relationship between movement, music, and language lies within their explicit drum syntax producing Ewephone comprehension, which is processed through the body’s varying porous kinaesonic surfaces. This principle process is conceptualized as Dynamic Rhythm, the metacomponent of Embodiology, which is both a training methodology and a theoretical framework that makes inherent improvisation discernable to the nonpractitioner. In addition, as a result of this understanding, interlocking aesthetic values within West African performance practices are identifiable within the African Diaspora. This articulation of improvisation from a West African perspective creates a gateway for both the scholarly and artistic fields of dance to develop a way to understand these autopoietic phenomena that were, until now, largely hidden.

scholarly journals The impact of making music on aural perception and language skills: A research synthesis

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Hallam
Keyword(s):  
Intervention Studies ◽  
Language Skills ◽  
Musical Training ◽  
School Curriculum ◽  
Relative Importance ◽  
Music And Language ◽  
Development Of Language ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Relationship

This paper provides a synthesis of research on the relationship between music and language, drawing on evidence from neuroscience, psychology, sociology and education. It sets out why it has become necessary to justify the role of music in the school curriculum and summarizes the different methodologies adopted by researchers in the field. It considers research exploring the way that music and language are processed, including differences and commonalities; addresses the relative importance of genetics versus length of time committed to, and spent, making music; discusses theories of modularity and sensitive periods; sets out the OPERA hypothesis; critically evaluates research comparing musicians with non-musicians; and presents detailed accounts of intervention studies with children and those from deprived backgrounds, taking account of the importance of the nature of the musical training. It concludes that making music has a major impact on the development of language skills.

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