earticle

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Music, as language, is a universal human trait. It appears to transcend time, place, and culture. This suggests that similarities between the two are non-accidental but that there must be some common principles underlying both language and music. I discuss the following four topics in this paper: (1) Linguistic expressions of music, (2) Language-like musical structures, (3) Text-tune association, and (4) Biological basis in language and music. In (1), I talk about a descriptive nature of music, that is, speech by music, or painting in sound, as can be seen in such titles as “Trout quintet,” “Moonlight sonata,” “Pathetique symphony,” etc. I cite the composers’ own notes and sketches regarding their works, in particular, the (sub)titles that composers gave to each movement of their symphonic works, i.e., in Beethoven’s Pastoral symphony, Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, and Debussy’s La Mer. In (2), mostly citing the works by Jackendoff and Lerdahl, I show that just as sentences have a hierarchical structure, so does music, that musical notes are grouped into constituents. I also show that just as there are transformations in language giving stylistically varying sentences, there are theme and variations in music. I cite Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3 (Eroica) as a prime example. An interesting example of music as a mirror of language is that just as there is a greater difference between vowel lengths in English (between stressed and unstressed vowels) than in French (between accented and unaccented vowels), there is a greater difference in the distance between two notes in English music than in French music. In (3) I show a close correlation between text (language) and tune (music), between vowel durations and note lengths, between stressed syllable (downbeat) and unstressed syllable (upbeat), and between intonation contours in language and musical phrasing. I also show how different phonological and syntactic structures between Latin and German, and between English and Korean, entail unmusical discrepancies in text-tune matching. In (4), I discuss a possible biological basis or innateness of music by reviewing the literature, mostly Peretz (2006) and Patel (2008) and many references cited there. I conclude that while there are enough indications to suggest that music is domain-specific and localized in the human brain, there is as yet no evidence showing the existence of a music gene à la language, that is, music is innate.