One of the first guest-speakers on this broadcast is a psychologist who studies how we perceive sound. She gives an example of a time when she had recorded herself speaking and was listening back on that recording, having placed one segment of it on "loop" -- as she had gone into the other room and had forgotten that she left this loop running, she sipped her tea as she became aware of "singing" from within her house. She then realized that the singing was in fact the looped segment of her speaking the words "sometimes behave so strangely," which had, in her perception, morphed into song rather than speech. If you listen, you will hear this, too.
What I find interesting is that people are a bit amazed by this seeming outburst of song within what we have determined to be speech, and it appears to raise the question for the group : "What is music ?" I think this takes a lot for granted, actually, and I think the real question rather is, firstly, what is speech ?
John Laver, in an introduction to his book "Principles of Phonetics" writes about language :
"Underlying the apparent diversity shown by the thousands of mutually incomprehensible languages of the world, there is a remarkable, elegant and principled unity in the way that these languages exploit the phonetic resources of speech."
This points to some unity existing between all languages in the entire world, and to take that a little further, I would say that I think now there is not a variety of different languages, but one, universal language that exists between all of us. The principles that underlay our communication are drawn on by all of our species. What I find remarkable is that these principles share the same qualities as what we call music.
Poetry, for example, is poetic because of it's rhythm, because of it's meter, because of how the words are organized and fit together -- however, it is still just a particular use of an already established language. These things are similar to groupings of notes and their organizations around pulse and pitch. Certain languages, such as Mandrin, have particular tones which express particular meanings, where the seemingly same word can have several different meanings depending on the tonal placement of the spoken word.
To me, this all points to music. To me it becomes obvious that our universal language is musical, and though it seems to our limited perception that we have various languages that are indecipherable to others, it is not actually a separate entity, but rather a different use of the same principles.
I think of all languages as being together as one, like a digital piano that has a kind of infinite tone bank.
Why do we sometimes perceive speech as being musical ? Well, because it is and, I think that's all it is. And, in a sense, I think this is all we have together.
So now, I do ask what is music ? Well, I ask this with the seeming-perception that it is all-encompassing. There is not really some sounds that are musical and some that are not. In my current state of being, there is not really any being, any existence, any interaction that does not point to music. It is all interchangeable, and it is one in the same.
Several nights ago, I had a dream in music. Everybody in this dream communicated through song and everybody sang a Santcus. Everything around me was music. It seems that I am not dreaming any longer, but my perception of the world around me is beginning to resemble this dream. Evidence seems to suggest that this is reality.
Topic: "Musical Language" -- New York Public Broadcast