Toward a first-year project.

[eirias]

Haven't updated this in ages; stopped doing much reading for a couple months and now that I've started again I really ought to try updating. It's a useful thing.

For now, though, I have a question. If you were going to invent a new system of music different from Western music, how would you do it? What kinds of regularities would you include?

Comments

[eirias.livejournal.com]

*nods* Yeah, a lot of that stuff has come up in talks I've had with Jen; psycholinguists refer to it as "stress-timed" vs. "syllable-timed." Japanese is syllable-timed, hence the superiority of haiku in its native tongue :). A fellow grad student in my lab does stuff with prosody and word segmentation. Apparently trochaic words are much easier for infants to learn than iambic words, at least in Dutch & English. Unfortunately, there are too few iambic languages for us to really be sure what that means.

The things I'm most concerned about replicating, though, are below-surface things like grammar. I'm interested in the logical relationships between musical "chunks" - can we create something that's equivalent to a false grammar using musical stimuli?

I'm going to talk to Orkid about this later and see what she has to say. Seeing how another musical system (Indian classical music) differs from my own may be a good starting point

[ukelele.livejournal.com]

Uh...that's weird. I tend to think of there being not really any difference between iambs and trochees (and man, I'm gonna have to hurt myself for that grammar). I mean...in extended blocks of speech, there aren't. Though I guess single words you could tell the difference...summer versus ...uh, OK, I'm having real problems thinking of an iambic word here...maybe that would be why...okay I'm seeing your point...select. Hum. Now I'm very curious about the etymologies here -- I wonder if non-trochaic words disproportionately from far-off bits of the big ol' linguistic tree? I mean, "select" has to be Latin, but I don't know where "summer" is from.

*hrm* I noticed the other day, watching soccer on Univision ;), that Spanish tends very strongly to accent every other syllable...I mean, way more than English does...I wonder if that's part of why it sounds so fast to a lot of English speakers, the unbroken pattern of quick meter. (That and the extremely pure consonants, which I imagine are rather faster to say than all those wacky diphthongs other languages have.)

*hrm* I wonder how people's reactions to, say, (a) languages they don't know (b) nonlanguages compare to their reactions to (a) musical systems they don't know (b) there is no b. I mean, when I am in a Chinese restaurant and hear some wacky pentatonic thing going on, my innate reaction is "that is not music." My brain has to say, no, no, it is, but my emotions are really unconvinced, because the rules are so foreign.

*hrm* Wasn't a whole lot of twentieth-century music all about breaking the rules of counterpoint? Yeah, twelve-tone, baby. Not that I want to condemn you to a life of Schoenberg or anything.

Uh, yeah. Back to what you said. Exploring another musical system. Very clever. Your research. Bitchin' cool. Me. Envious.