My New Language, all you need is a symphonic voice

Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain by Oliver Sacks

Music as a language. This article relates some anecdotes of "Here are tales of a man possessed with an insatiable desire to hear piano music after being struck by lightning, of another whose epileptic seizure created permanent music “playing” inside his head, of an eminent musicologist (the English conductor Clive Wearing) whose musical powers were unimpaired even though amnesia blotted out everything else, and of a severely retarded man able to recall hundreds of operas and play Debussy from ear after hearing it once." This got me thinking about the origins of music, and how they might be related to language. From these stories, it seems it is something that our mind spends quite a bit of resources on. Evolutionarily, music as we know it seems to be a rather recent invention, a by-product of human intellect. How did it get there? Why? As the article asks why "meaningless vibrations have such an effect on our mental state."

My roomate and I often compare elaborate pieces of classical music to novels: they both lend themselves to analysis in similar ways. For example, the overall tone of a book or a piece of music can be described as hopeful, gloomy, excited. Both can be complex, simple, elaborate, or eloquent in their overall perception by the reader/listener. There are motifs that are revisited. In language, certain phrases have what is described as a "lyrical" quality. Poetry lends itself to a certain rhythm. Certain languages in particular have elaborate use of different tonalities in pronunciation to differentiate words, as in Mandarin. In music, different instruments or instrument sections are often played off one another as if they were characters in a narrative: they echo one another, they contrast one another, and sometimes they all work together in harmony.

Because of all these similarities, I suspect that the evolutionary "fluke" of music is directly related to language. Music, I think, could also potentially be used as its own language. The reason it probably has not been used as such yet is because any human who has functioning ears and voice finds those to be a more convenient mode of expression than finding a piano or whipping out a flute every time he or she wants to express something to another person. However, consider how musical our language could be if we had vocal chords that could produce all the tones, dynamics, and timbres of a symphony simultaneously, as a symphony could. Tongues would clearly be unnecessary, and this hypothetical language would instead sound like compositions of music rather than the mechanical clicks, hisses, and bursts of words as we know them.

Dynamics would largely be the same, with higher volume used for emphasis, in times of great emotion, or when communicating over a large area. Tonal shifts would, of course, be far more elaborate than in any language currently spoken. The speed at which one note shifts to another, the type of shift (a gradual slide like a trombone, or a pure interval like a piano), and the tonal interval (a first, a third, an octave) could all be different communicative devices. The real power of a language like this (which is essentially present in great orchestral compositions) is the simultaneity of communication possible. That is, with dozens or hundreds of musicians, playing scores of different instruments, there are simultaneous levels to every instant of a piece of music. Some sections are silent, this means something. Some are voiced, this means something else. Some are excited and carry the melody; some voice occasional bass notes which ground the melody; some pulse the tempo; some simply add a flourish here and there. Every instrument can be used for a variety of purposes, and favoring one over the other in different circumstances would be analogous to the level of formality that we use in speech. In more formal situations, it would be proper to follow the expected norms (have the violins carry the tune, the basses throb the underlying foundation), but in more informal situations one could experiment with new combinations; people could find more efficient ways of expressing things, and thus a musical shift would emerge just as lingual shifts (new words are born, old words die) happen in our spoken language.

Music and language share so many aspects, I'm fairly sure we would not have music were it not for our lingual abilities. If there be scientific work in this area, I'd love to hear about it.