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Hey.
Not just compare. How can we steal from spoken language?
There's a bunch of books about motif-development. But lets steal from what works 100% - the human tongue.
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05-30-2024 05:09 PM
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Or dog language?
There was a video how a puppy was anxious, the owner didn't know what to do. But the older dog went to the door and tried to signal them to open it. The dog got it, the humans were ignorant.
Music could be like that - everyone yapps about it but no one really gets it. The notes. We don't know what they really mean. Because it is too ancient and not really understood by high level humans.
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I'm not a huge fan of music-as-language comparisons, but two that work:
1. Question and answer.
2. The trope that 90% (or whatever someone decides to say) of communication is non-verbal. Meaning we convey more through our tone, gestures, posture, rhythm, cadence, facial expression etc than we do through our words. That seems useful in music also
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This is the language comparison I like: speech patterns.
See Eric Dolphy.
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But there is so much more in spoken language than just that.
Originally Posted by pamosmusic
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I know … just don’t think language is the best analogy for music Originally Posted by emanresu
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What's the second best? Originally Posted by pamosmusic
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Eh. My point is, music didn't just jump out of nowhere.
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Music and language have different purposes. Questions and answers in music are not real. No information is broadcast or received.
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There are parallels, but I don't think they're the same. To be able to do them you need the same type of study and tools but then they don't express the same things. You can't communicate literal information with music outside of lyrics. It's just artistry with emotions.
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Except it's not always an analogy Originally Posted by pamosmusic
Talking drum - Wikipedia
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I get that language's first purpose is to convey information and meanings. Yet, a conversation doesn't have to be meaningful or informative at all to be enjoyable. Originally Posted by Litterick
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I read a philosopher once whose name I forget who stated that humans have five means of expression that do not significantly overlap, but convey meaning in different ways:
- Language
- Mathematics
- Music
- Visual Form
- Silence
I agree with this. So analogies across these are always tenuous because they involve reducing one or the other from its most distinctive character.
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As a guitar player that doesn’t sing and sometimes writes music, what I will sometimes do as a useful exercise, is take a poem or any section of verse. Prose works, too. And I will write a melody from the syllables of the words. Then, I harmonize the melody. Then, toss the text. What I have is a more songlike outcome, than I would have had, without the language.
Doing this often enough, I have to believe this has crept into my improv…it has made me more intentional about phrasing, pausing for breath, and melodies that are speechlike or singsong-y.
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One thing spoken language and music have in common: Sometimes the best thing to say or play is nothing at all.
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This is almost exactly what I try to do to occasionally. And is the exact reason for starting this topic. Originally Posted by enalnitram
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The only meaningful point of comparison between language and music (at least that I can think of) is the notion of "fluency."
Take, for example, a conversation between a native speaker and someone who's still learning the language. The language learner will almost always speak with some kind of accent that a native speaker can immediately hear. The language learner will probably make some errors here and there, which again the native speaker will notice. But most of the time, the native speaker knows what the language learner meant to say.
There's a similar notion in music. If you've done enough listening and playing jazz, you can hear when someone doesn't have their music in their bones, so to speak. Even if they're playing the correct notes, other things jump out (accents, phrasing, time-feel) as unidiomatic.
I really do think of bebop as a kind of jazz "accent." You can hear when someone has put in the work and really can play bebop. They have a particular way they play 8th note lines, a certain rhythmic feel, ways of playing asymmetrical phrases. When someone like Chick Corea (who was a Bud Powell devotee) plays fusion with a straight-eighth feel, you can still tell they have that bebop background.
Beyond that, I think it's extremely difficult for music to communicate anything concrete. You could try to argue that Beethoven "communicated" a thunderstorm in Symphony No. 6, or that Grieg "communicated" a sunrise in Peer Gynt. But those are very basic ideas, and we mostly recognize their meaning through cultural conditioning. It's very easy to imagine someone completely missing their meaning in a way that you cannot with stating "Oh, there's a thunderstorm outside!"
Even describing music in terms of its emotional content is really difficult. Take something like Chopin's etude in Eb minor. What emotions is it expressing? Sadness, longing, despair, resignation? Maybe, but that doesn't even come close to doing justice to all the different shades of light and dark he summons, the journey through different states, the emotions that exist in the cracks between the words used to describe them.
They are separate domains of the human experience that only briefly overlap in superficial ways, and I find that to be wonderful.
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I have listened to a lot of masterclasses of jazz musicians recently and once thing that is mentioned all the time (and has not been mentioned here as far as I see) is the parallel between the acquisition of a spoken language and the acquisition of the musical jazz language as well as the parallels of the use of a spoken language and the use of the musical jazz language.
You learn your first spoken language (formerly known as "mother's tongue") as a child by listening to speakers of that language (usually your parents first) and you start by trying things out with your mouth. By listening you also acquire the rules of that language (grammar etc.) unconsciously. The more of a fluent speaker you become the more things you are able to express by talking. And while you are talking you apply the rules without thinking about them. This also applies to secondary languages that you have learned in school by also consciously looking at and practicing the rules of that language. When you speak them you do not think all the time: "Now I am using a subject and a verb and this is an adjective and this is an adverb." You simply use the language to express the things you want to say and that come out of your mind in the moment.
If you are a fluent jazz player you do not think about every single note of a phrase you play but you are able to form musical "sentences" out of the moment from your experience of the things you have listened to and you have practiced.
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Yeah this is a big jump in skill. Thinking in licks (lines, phrases, melodic cells, melodies, whatever your ego needs to call it) instead of notes. Originally Posted by Bop Head
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Misunderstanding. Not thinking. Something meaningful just comes out. Originally Posted by AllanAllen
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Yeah when I find myself using language analogies, it’s almost always process-oriented.
We had a meeting yesterday for this place where I teach and the director was talking about sight reading and I mentioned that we should have a list of rhythms we want them to recognize as units, rather than decoding one note at a time. And I compared it to the way young readers are taught “sight words” — or words that are simple and common enough that they’re taught as units rather than as composed of letter sounds.
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Just re-read that and have to add: Because you want to say something (and hopefully have s/th to say). Originally Posted by Bop Head
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Speech and music both seem to be deeply embedded in human neuromuscular systems (and speech perhaps in those of other species). All neurologically normal humans can and will acquire language when exposed to it within the optimal acquisition period (up to around age 9), and every human culture I'm aware of has music. On the other hand, there is evidence that for most people the ability to acquire a second language falls off sharply after the "sensitive period," while I strongly suspect that musical competences, even those outside one's home culture, can be acquired throughout life. (Though if you want to be really, really good at African-American musics, it helps a lot to grow up in or at least next door to the black church.)
Those two acquisition models suggest that while speech and music share a lot of neuromuscular and developmental machineries, they're still distinct systems--and they overlap a great deal when it comes to being expressive. Then there's the fact that some people are clearly "wired" for music production, which argues for deeply embedded neurological (and maybe muscular) processes.
FWIW, my experience of my linguistic abilities feels quite different from my musical ones. I can and do improvise freely and with considerable precision when I talk or write, while my musical strayings from the familiar and practiced are quite limited--except for my musical phrasing, which feels exactly like how I phrase my speech. (I have a whole mini-lecture on how to run variations on readings of a poem, which is strongly influenced by how I approach a song lyric, which in turn is strongly influenced by observing how an actor can read lines of Shakespeare and by a course that merged linguistics, prosody, and rhetoric.)
My bottom line: Comfort with musical improvisation is almost certainly dependent on persistence and intensity of practice in the underlying skills and on a kind of immersion in the musical material in question.
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'Let's Compare Improvisation to Spoken Language'
There's improvisation in spoken language. I do it all the time.
When improvisation involves another person, both music and speech have listening and comprehension in common.
Jazz and Comedy Improv have a lot in common: listening and building on what the other person is putting out. Also, setting up the other for best result: straight-man and comping. Working together to a common end. (hopefully)
If we're looking for something to take from speech, it's as others have said: pattern, rhythm, phrasing, dynamics, accent etc. And that direct unified connection between brain, heart and mouth. We'd like to have that with our instruments.
Direct comparison between music and speech is fun, partly because some ideas cross over between the two but they still remain fundamentally different animals. It's like comparing visual art and music.
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I’d sum it up as “cadence.”
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