A thought about music and language

I know this is going to be hard because I'm far to be a native speaker + i'm stoned

but

One night I had a discussion with a friend, and in that discussion I confessed that I was naturally more turned towards music without vocals. I told him that I kinda think vocals usually take too more space in a song and then this space is too little for the instrumentation. Also I told him that in the music-without-vocals-I-loved, I heard a musical whole sort of imitating the human voice ; that's why I love the acid sound so much : it's imo very close to our voice and I always hear it as it's singing in a way.

On a physiological level, our ear is more sensitive to a frequency band corresponding to the human voice, so I suppose musicians naturally tend to use this band more than the other ones.

When I started to make music, I figured out I was unconsciously visualising some synths in my tracks as little imaginary singing animals. (yeah I know that's weird but that's just the way it is).

Can anyone relate to at least a part of what I'm saying ? The friend with who I had this discussion is a musician as well and didn't think that way, I'm just curious about the watmmheads.

woops, i posted in the wrong forum :/

I think it would help this discussion if we knew more about the origins of music. When humans first created music (i.e. attempted to create beauty with a noise), what kind of noise was it? I'm leaning towards something either vocal or percussive.

I like music with vocals, but I never really pay close attention to the words that much. the voice becomes just another instrument..

my mother was always playing tori amos' first album and I was reading Dune at the time, so all the music sort of fitted into that. It made it part of the story.. Many years later I started paying attention to the words and read the lyrics, and that almost completely changed how I heard it. definetly prefered it without knowing the words.

wow, that's an interesting thought. I would like to hear that music so much. The hugest thrills ever

Just as a precision, there's a lot of sang music that I love. I love Pink Floyd, I love Nirvana, Mr Bungle, Coil, Portishead ..... and a lot of other things, that's just I'm always extremely selective when vocals are involved.

I agree with what you've written.

Music is very connected to the voice. I remember analyzing a Sibelius piece in college, and my professor said "notice that none of the melodies start on an upbeat (like, the & of 4), they all start on the downbeat (1). It's because in the Finnish language (Sibelius was Finnish) most of how their sentences are structured, place the emphasis on the the downbeat.

And yes, I visualize my sounds as well... not as creatures, but abstract entities that have character, and traits. It's not that I imagine creatures speaking these sounds, I imagine the sounds as being the creature. One and the same.

When I was a kid my mum constantly played Tubular Bells. Even as a kid of maybe 6 or 7 years old I remember loving every single part of it and even still it is probably my favourite piece of music. I think that is probably where my appreciation of instrumental music stems from. I do think you need vocals sometimes though. I have had periods of several months where I have listened to nothing but instrumental but its really not good. The best vocals in my opinion are those which just slot in as though they were an instrument. Thom Yorke is probably the best I have ever heard at doing this.

True, Thom Yorke is really good at seamlessly blending his voice into the patchwork of the song. And a turn of phrase in his lyrics will stand out and add up to a very vivid or poignant moment, but it's still very much married to the music and vice versa. The lyrics add something substantial, but aren't the only draw of the music. I guess this is why I never got into Dylan. I need some lush sonic trippyness to sink into.

I've been listening to Turn On The Bright Lights a lot lately, and even though the lyrics are awkward and goofy, I think it actually adds a lot of flavor to the album. It seems like it could be taking a page from David Byrne, who can come across as an extremely odd, frantic aspergers guy observing everyday things and making them sound profound with his weird perspective. Paul Banks comes across in a similar way, but almost as a hokey jokester/date rapist who's always been socially challenged. I know now that it's unintentional, he's just a bad lyricist. But to me it works because it seems like most Post Punk bands have a frontman who appears batshit and unhinged or like an unreliable narrator. I just think it would have been really brilliant if it was intentional.

A short essay that I wrote in 2009 about this subject:

Machine Language of the Universe

For me music is the artform that operates closest to the language of the universe. As science probes deeper into the sub-atomic world they seem to find that everything is oscillations and vibrations. Now they're down to vibrating "strings", and it wouldn't surprise me that eventually they will find that there is no actual solid matter at all - just an illusion held up by oscillations and vibrations.

Instrumental music to me is the purest form of the art. Once you add vocals you have now added a layer which requires translation. You're operating in a specific language that requires decoding by the higher parts of the brain. So it follows for me reading a book is not as direct of an experience as music, because part of my brain has to decode the words I'm reading, interpret them and then my imagination creates the story in my mind.

I like to compare the various artforms to computer languages - most artforms other than instrumental music require a layer of translation, such as it is with C++ or Basic. However, instrumental music communicates in the machine language of the universe - pure vibration.

An analogy might be as in the first Matrix movie when Neo reaches enlightenment and can see the Matrix as it really is, streams of green ones and zeros. Similarly, when we listen to instrumental music we are experiencing the universe as it really is.

There is an old saying that music is the universal language - if it truly is the machine language of the universe then this makes total sense. Also, isn't it incredible that instrumental music can convey emotion? Even more incredible is that a piece of music can convey the same emotion to people everywhere in the world. Of course there is also the saying "music can soothe the savage beast" - further support of my theory.

Music: Machine Language of the Universe... I believe it!

Lyrics don't matter much to me (unless they're bat-shit stupid). I used to only like instrumental tracks (because I felt the music was more expressive) but now I love lyrics in music because they're very fun to sing along to.

I think the similarity between music and language is expression. Humankind's best speakers all had fantastic expression in their voice, and the best music is also full of expression.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0c9NOVtLSI&feature=related

1:08 to 1:42 is so damn expressive imo. So is acid. The sound in that song and the acid sound have some similar qualities as well. The way the tone changes and such. Idk.

  On 3/5/2012 at 12:38 AM, SecondaryCell said:

A short essay that I wrote in 2009 about this subject:

 

 

Machine Language of the Universe

 

For me music is the artform that operates closest to the language of the universe. As science probes deeper into the sub-atomic world they seem to find that everything is oscillations and vibrations. Now they're down to vibrating "strings", and it wouldn't surprise me that eventually they will find that there is no actual solid matter at all - just an illusion held up by oscillations and vibrations.

 

Instrumental music to me is the purest form of the art. Once you add vocals you have now added a layer which requires translation. You're operating in a specific language that requires decoding by the higher parts of the brain. So it follows for me reading a book is not as direct of an experience as music, because part of my brain has to decode the words I'm reading, interpret them and then my imagination creates the story in my mind.

 

I like to compare the various artforms to computer languages - most artforms other than instrumental music require a layer of translation, such as it is with C++ or Basic. However, instrumental music communicates in the machine language of the universe - pure vibration.

 

An analogy might be as in the first Matrix movie when Neo reaches enlightenment and can see the Matrix as it really is, streams of green ones and zeros. Similarly, when we listen to instrumental music we are experiencing the universe as it really is.

 

There is an old saying that music is the universal language - if it truly is the machine language of the universe then this makes total sense. Also, isn't it incredible that instrumental music can convey emotion? Even more incredible is that a piece of music can convey the same emotion to people everywhere in the world. Of course there is also the saying "music can soothe the savage beast" - further support of my theory.

 

Music: Machine Language of the Universe... I believe it!

music seems more environmentally-based imo. here's something i wrote about it for a class.

  Quote

Question: How are universal aspects of color perception related to sound and music?

Answer: According to Kay & Regier, “universal aspects of perceptual-cognitive structure might correspond to invariants in the environment, internalized over the course of evolution.” This suggests that the basic cognitive structures we have that determine focal colors reflect common distributions of colors in the world. Can a similar argument be applied to other types of sense experience, such as sound?

 

It is not a coincidence that our audible range corresponds to sounds we would hear in nature—the call of a predator, footsteps, lightning, etc. Naturally, an organism that was more sensitive to dangerous sounds would have better environmental fitness than other organisms. However, these universal aspects of sound have turned into something most unexpected: music.

 

Music is something that all humans perceive—unlike most animals, who cannot understand rhythm (some birds being the exception). Are similar constructs present in color perception as well? Kay & Regier report that human languages all display some type of categorization related to warm and cool colors. Many psychologists suggest that cool colors are associated with calmness and warm colors are more frenetic. This sensory-crossover is extremely similar to the crossover seen in music. We associate certain tones and rhythms with calmness and others with high energy almost universally.

 

For colors, the evolutionary source seems rather obvious: in nature, red things do tend to be more dangerous. Therefore, an organism that immediately filters red into the “danger” category instead of trying to understand the context of the situation first has a higher chance for survival and reproduction. But what is the evolutionary source for the perception of music? Is it a purely social construct or is it somehow related to the dangers in our environment? As with most psychological phenomenon, it seems related to both.

 

Perception of music certainly has some basis in the environment. For instance, take the Doppler effect. Neuropsychologists have determined that people can use the Doppler effect to identify whether a moving sound is approaching or retreating. This has a strong evolutionary basis because it can signal the arrival of danger. In this sense, perhaps the emotional overlap that music has stems from the association of certain sounds with danger and others with safety. This is all conjecture, of course, but it would be interesting to examine. A simple experiment that analyzes emotional reactions to “approaching” and “retreating” sounds via the Doppler effect could reveal an evolutionary relationship between sound and emotion.

  On 3/5/2012 at 12:01 AM, Kcinsu said:

Music is very connected to the voice. I remember analyzing a Sibelius piece in college, and my professor said "notice that none of the melodies start on an upbeat (like, the & of 4), they all start on the downbeat (1). It's because in the Finnish language (Sibelius was Finnish) most of how their sentences are structured, place the emphasis on the the downbeat.

i love this. metrical theory is fascinating to me, especially in that context.

i agree with this topic but also i love vocals. i love the vocals-as-instrument style, especially when vocal sounds get all tore up in some electronics (coh plays cosey).

but sometimes i love lyricism too. depends on what i'm in the mood for - dense, lyrical cleverness is great fun, and it can really send your mind to strange and beautiful places. but it is more of a concrete, black-and-white artistic style i think, where music with voices made out of tones and contours is more abstract and colorful.

I don't perceive much of a correspondence between music and language, although I must admit to unwittingly using analogies that pair the two. When I talk from here on out, I'll be referring to music that is purely instrumental. No words.

First off, music is not a language. It is not a language in the sense that we are using English in this discussion. There are no set symbols which correspond to definite objects, concepts, or abstract ideas. For a language to work it needs definite and repeatable symbols that everyone can agree represent something. Otherwise there can be no communication. I cannot play a riff that will communicate that I'm disappointed to have dropped my sandwich on the ground, but am feeling better because it was only there for three seconds.

A cliche of music is that major chords are happy and that minor chords represent sadness or some degree of it. These thoughts are arbitrary and, I suspect, greatly shaped by the culture of western music. I do not know of any instances of concrete repeatable symbols and because of this it cannot communicate. If anything, all music is capable of expressing is itself. Nothing else. A Bb is a Bb is a Bb.

I should point out that some people have started down the path to defining such symbols in programmatic music. 'Peter and the Wolf' comes to mind, in which the bassoon is designated as representing the wolf (for example) and the flute a young man (I'm just guessing on the precise instrumentation, btw). Another notable effort are the operas of Richard Wagner and his use of leitmotif to represent characters, objects, or emotions. The assignment of these themes was taken to such extremes that it became something of a musical directory. Great evil is present? Play the evil theme. The ring appears? Bring out the ring theme! This is a whole lot of fun, but in every case I know of these symbols are never intended to persist or be utilized outside of their respective compositions. To use the 'Tristan und Isolde' love theme in a piece of music would be considered a quote, and not likely as a declaration of unresolved love.

Perhaps it gets a little grey once you start incorporating founds sounds or samples of voices that are used in a musical manner and in our age of synthesized sounds, we can direct computers and orchestras to perform a spectrum of sound that closely approximates the frequency patterns of human voices. This amounts to little more than dressing a scoop of mashed potatoes up with some dark gravy and a grape tomato to make it look like a hot fudge sunday. What? Actually, that analogy might not work so well. Anyways, the recent acceptance of such abstract sounds (think Stockhausen, Varese, Xenakis) as music doesn't do much to further the agenda of employing music as any kind of language. To recreate the spectrum of the human voice is not necessarily music. I'm inclined to think of it as a novelty.

Before I leave. Here's something fun. Scientists recently had a breakthrough in the field of sonar communication between dolphins. As we know, dolphins emit a series of high frequency clicks that are reflected off of any objects before them and upon their return to the dolphin they depict the shape of the objects before them. Typical sonar stuff. What was recently discovered was that dolphins are then able to repeatedly render that exact sonic information and transmit it through the water to other dolphins. When the other dolphins receive this sonic signal they are able to perceive that exact image sent by the first dolphin. In this way dolphins have a visual language that uses sound as it's medium for communication.

So, what does this mean for the use of sound, and possibly music, as a form of communication?

This morning I had a bowl of bran cereal, an activia yogurt and a few coffees and I have never had to shit so fast in my life. That is one fucking lethal combination for your digestive system. I thought I was gonna shit my pants before I got to the bathroom.

Sorry, I didn't think this was worthy of its own thread but I just had to say it somewhere.

Music is not a language. It is a form of communication. Musical styles are more like languages.

  On 3/5/2012 at 11:56 PM, Lindrum Larry Cocopipe said:

This morning I had a bowl of bran cereal, an activia yogurt and a few coffees and I have never had to shit so fast in my life. That is one fucking lethal combination for your digestive system. I thought I was gonna shit my pants before I got to the bathroom.

 

Sorry, I didn't think this was worthy of its own thread but I just had to say it somewhere.

I hate to quote myself but I wanted to point out that I just realized this was my post 303. I wasted it. Should have made it a bit special somehow. Will have to wait for 606 now. I refuse to recognize 505.

  On 3/5/2012 at 10:23 PM, Hoodie said:

 

 

Perception of music certainly has some basis in the environment. For instance, take the Doppler effect. Neuropsychologists have determined that people can use the Doppler effect to identify whether a moving sound is approaching or retreating. This has a strong evolutionary basis because it can signal the arrival of danger. In this sense, perhaps the emotional overlap that music has stems from the association of certain sounds with danger and others with safety. This is all conjecture, of course, but it would be interesting to examine. A simple experiment that analyzes emotional reactions to “approaching” and “retreating” sounds via the Doppler effect could reveal an evolutionary relationship between sound and emotion.

That was interesting from an evolutionary perspective. The question they asked you on that is pretty open ended however I guess they wanted you to tie in some developmental functions to support your answer.

The Doppler effect can be reduced down to interaural differences where soundwaves traveling to one ear may take longer/lesser time than the other ear. The secondary auditory cortex can detect this subtle difference by comparing time differences which can be used for localization, yet another survival technique.

The auditory association cortex works very closely to memory and emotion (in terms of distance), which could explain the causes as to why certain sound frequencies may induce fear or a life threatening memory. For instance in synthesthetes, the perception of coloring numbers and letters is very common because the region associated with encoding letters and numbers and color are right next to eachother

I wouldn't be surprised if the auditory cortex has some ingrained frequencies that shock us into fight or flight mode when it is perceived.

Here's pretty cool study of auditory function using fMRI, definitely right up your alley hoodie http://bmb.oxfordjournals.org/content/63/1/95.full

Maybe, through some definition of language, it's the same as music. But I hate attempts to pigeonhole music into something quantifiable or easier to understand. In no way will it make it justice or improve on its worth, and it's likely to be false. Maybe I will contradict myself here but I think that music is nature. It's man's connection with nature. It's man himself. Music needs a listener to even exist, so when you listen to music, you also listen to you. I enjoy most vocal music less because the best things to communicate with music are the things you can't capture with words. I love language, but I also like T McKenna's saying, that it's a virus from outer space. It traps you.

I can relate in the sense that when I'm working with sound, the patches get handled like characters, with their general tone or mood being their identity and their notes / timing being their style of communicating.

When I first got an instrument (guitar) I would play a few notes on one area of the fretboard and then move elsewhere to craft some sort of response to the first clump of notes. Sounds terrible but it was the best narrative I could put together with what little I knew about music.

These days that has shifted to imagining a crowd of elements hanging out in the soundstage and shifting their shapes (osc, stereo distribution, others), definition (delays,reverb, etc), lighting (lowpass highpass..) blah blah, to choreograph their gestures or conversations.

And I also tend to block out what vocals are literally saying and interpret their character in the context of all the other elements. Not to say there aren't musicians choosing their words wisely, but usually, for me, the words can obscure, distract from, or override a much lovelier scene.

I very much agree with your post, Antape. I personally have no need for vocals in my music, and for the music that I listen to which does have vocals, the timbre is often closer to something that could be easily replicable on a keyboard or sax, not to mention long drawn out phrasing which has less of a relation to actual language. What I mean by this is that if I do like the lyrics in a song, it won't so much be about the narrative or poetic content, but the sound or rhythm of the voice. To me, this is indicative of vocals being kind of once-removed from an instrument, something that is superfluous and is better conveyed through other instrumentation.

The arguments I read about the quality of Thom Yorke's voice being its use "as an instrument" reinforces my position that if his voice IS working like an instrument, then I read that as his voice being a kind of imitation, and I question why he bothers with the lyrics at all.

I don't expect people to side with me on that, though

i think vocals can be used in certain music. sometimes they're just that extra 'thing' that fills the sound up with substance.

for example, I'm an Animal Collective fan... their music is largely experimental/electronic... and depends hugely on the instrumentals going on. The vocals just sort of fill the space and carry the melody, their purpose for me doesn't go beyond that. I don't usually know what they're singing, it just fills up the sound field and gives the mind something to latch onto.

So I guess vox are best suited to melodic pop music... for me I don't generally think melodies are good without vocals unless they're of the 'classical' sort where the melody is slyly tied in with the complex harmonies underneath... most musicians these days aren't capable of that.

I enjoy Vox more when they have been 'fucked wit' like Mouse on Mars does, or Burial. Actually it seems that trend is getting bigger now... a Britney Spears song recently cut the vox up really well... I was pretty surprised hearing it and enjoyed it.

Straight singing is tiresome and relies too much on the personality of the singer, in my opinion.

I imagine it like this

the top is the vox melody

the bottom is the drums, bass, harmonics, etc

1234--!!! lallla!! xeexee , epp !{!{!:):) ??hello! OK

[[[0[ ] ]oooo ] ] [[[ --] ] ] ] [ [ [ --[ [ ] ]]00 ] ] [[ [ [- ]]-

so the vox need to be painted to carry the forward movement and shifting style from moment to moment

while the bottom is basically a well crafted series of loops

that's how i look at it

So lyrics have no value to some people? Sounds kind of forced and reactionary, like "we're IDM fans, fuck lyrics they're for pussies."

I don't care much for the lyric messages either, but there are exceptions. Vocals are still important to me. When I listen to band music with vocals I treat them as just another instrument. And it's said that your voice is the most difficult instrument to play.