[lbo-talk] Language, music, and Kenneally

Michael Smith mjs at smithbowen.net
Wed Sep 2 08:14:58 PDT 2009


On Wed, 02 Sep 2009 01:16:30 -0700 Chuck Grimes <cgrimes at rawbw.com> wrote:


> Through a variety of experiments and studies, it
> also turns out that languages sounds and music making sounds have a
> correlation to the 12 tone chromatic scale of sounds. In other words the
> sounds that make up language sounds are pretty much the same as those
> that make up music.

This sounds mighty fishy. One would like to hear more about these "experiments and studies." For one thing, the "twelve tone chromatic scale" is an extremely recent Western European invention. How recent depends on how you define the term, but you don't find musical instruments with twelve defined notes per octave before the fourteenth century, and those notes don't become equally spaced (our modern "chromatic" scale") until the late 18th/mid 19th century.

In other cultures twelve notes per octave is rare, and twelve equally spaced notes (as far as I know) nonexistent; the equal spacing ("equal temperament") results from the requirements of modulation, which in turn rests on the recent primacy of tonality (or "key") rather than modality in European music. The latter starts to morph into the former, in our cultural history, in the late 17th/early 18th century.

If anything the pentatonic scale (in just intonation, NB, not tempered or Pythagorean) is more nearly universal.

It is fascinating how often, and in what multifarious guises, we find this same impulse to universalize our cultural norms.

--

Michael Smith mjs at smithbowen.net http://stopmebeforeivoteagain.org



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