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from How Musical is Man?, by John Blacking:

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In the musical system of the Venda [an African culture], it is rhythm that distinguishes song (u imba) from speech (u amba), so that patterns of words that are recited to a regular meter are called "songs." Both Stravinsky and the Venda insist that music involves man. The regular beats of an engine or a pump may sound like the beats of a drum, but no Venda would regard them as music or expect to be moved by them, because their order is not directly produced by human beings. The sound of electronic instruments or of a Moog synthesizer would not be excluded from ttheir realm of musical experience as long as it was only the timbre and not the method of ordering that was outside human control. Venda music is founded not on melody, but on a rhythmical stirring of the whole body of which singing is but one extension. Therefore, when we seem to hear a rest between two drumbeats, we must realize that for the player it is not a rest: each drumbeat is the part of a total body movement in which the hand or a stick strikes the drum skin.

These principles apply in the children's song Tshidula tsha Musingadi (Example 3), which for the Venda is music, and not speech or poetry.

One might expect the beat to fall on the syllables -du, tsha, and -nga-, which are stressed in performance. But if people clap to the song, they clap on the syllables Tshi-, -la, -si-, and -di, so that there is not a rest on the fourth beat, but a total pattern of four beats that can be repeated any number of times, but never less than once if it is to qualify as "song" and not "speech."

Not really. Although not like the Chinese, we speak in musical notes, with intonations going up and down. One can sing perfectly at speaking range. If you slow your vowels and stretch them out you will notice the note you are speaking at for that syllable.

Elena

Ok...that probably really only applies to different styles of singing then and not between speech and singing..

???

You lost me...

Elena

I was just waiting for the "music's universal" - debate to come, knew the statement was too wide. Anyway, I think it's still MORE understandable than a foreign language??????

But I still maintain that if I had to choose between music and speech, music is more beautiful, generally speaking.

Music is more beautiful, generally speaking ?!? Interesting statement, Ronel... generally speaking...

oh, how do u ppl do the whole quote thing? Is it just HTML coding or what?

Geqo - above each post is written "posted [date] [time]" and then four pictures. The first picture is a man standing next to a little card, and that shows you the members profile; the 2nd picture shows a man standing next to an envelope, and that lets you e-mail the member; the 3rd picture shows two people next to an envelope, and that lets you send him a private message; the 4th picture is 2 quote marks and it lets you quote the member.

Or, you can do it like this:

Ja well, don't try to get on my nerves with this one - remember, I know where you live....

Let me modify:

If you look at music in general, and speech in general, I think music is the more beautiful one of the two.

Comprehend now? :p

Hi from South Africa

great post Siddhartha...


Their is no seperation between music and speech.
Music as we know it was born from speech...influenced by speech. And speech is influenced by music. Both are forms of communication via our hearing senses.

It is the reason, for example, that high notes are to sound louder, more emphasized...simply because the human voice becomes louder and more emphasized at a higher pitch. It is why we have rubato and tenuto and accelerando,because as Siddhartha said above speech requires extreme nuance and we want that nuance in our music.

Now at an obvious level the two do appear to be seperate. Well the obvious part about it is that most music that we listen to uses harmony, multiple instruments, a rhythm section, a wide range of pitch and metered time. Speech on the other hand is solo (without harmony or backing) it is pitched but only at the micro level (Seldom would a persons speech go above or below a minor third between two words.) The pitch in speech is extremely subtle in comparison to singing.

The rhythm in speech is also much more nuanced. There is no meter and there is no sub-division. It's very free for all, it may speed up, hold back...it's not calculatable like most music.

Also a huge difference is tonal music has a aural key that it is in due to the harmonic aspect of music. Therefore unlike speech the pitches seem to be relative to a key signature and seem to create tension and resolution. That kind of aural comfort is not present in speech, you can not tell where the next pitch is going or when it's going to get there because speech isn't based on a series of phrases and relative tones.


But the line gets blurred between speech and music when like in contemporary music there is no meter or tonal center or even defined pitch. We still call this music. More and more contemporary composers are focusing on the aspect of sound rather then tonality or rhythm or melody, they look for the possibilities with exploring sound and the nuances in sound.

Speech is all about nuance of sound. It is about diction, it is about phrasing, it is about coloring the sound of your voice in an emotional way (tense, relaxed, nasaly, accented...)

To be good at speaking requires good ears and aural communication skills just like with music. Their is something very musical about somebody with good speaking abilities. And the reason is because both music and speech are communication techniques we as humans use to communicate are thoughts and feelings, no doubt they would both influence each other and have similar aspects.

In speech, every word or character has another meaning (definition), whereas in music, I doubt anybody would contend that a D7 chord, isolated, has any meaning
edit: I should have said that a D7 chord only has an abstract meaning (angry, happy, etc) whereas a word has a precise meaning (check the dictionary)

Kudos to Sam, that was a very profound subject.

Hi pianojerome,

You could be misreading the John Blacking quotes on the musical system of the Venda.

Body dance rhythms are not unique to the Venda - 9 other indigenous tribes of South Africa share the same passion for dance. All use the drum rhythm around which to interlace a simple and much-repeated lyric. The "monotonous" repetition (by Western standards) is due to the culture of a folk who were totally illiterate - not being able to write things down places a limit on memory - thus was developed a simple repeated message to the rhythm of the drum.

Any similarlity of Stravinsky's quote - "music involves man" - to the Venda and reading some far-fetched "rest" nuance into the playing of the drum is charmingly romantic folderol.

I think music we learn to feel an affinity to manages to express subconscious emotions for which there are no words, which is why it is so amazing.

BUT, sticking to the subject, any other theories on why the brain would ever recognize SONG and speech as two different things. At first I thought Bernard might be onto something but then realized that I can recognize speech as speech even in languages I don't understand, therefore meaning of words is not part of that recognition.

Elena

There are definatly differences in things like expression and articulation - certain things you stress more in song than you do in speech (the basic vowel sounds like ah, oo, ee, etc)

Then you listen to Figaro's Aria in The Barber of Seville and that theory goes out the window!

Elena

Here is a passage from a paper called "Language and Music", by William Bright, which discusses the content of music and language:

(It was read at the seventh conference of the Society for Ethnomusicology in 1961.)

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In seeking analogies between the content of music and that of language... it is necessary to distinguish two types of content. The content of a sentence is in part derived from its associations outside of language - from the objects, actions, and relationships to which the sentence refers. But as the same time it also derives content from its linguistic structure - from the phonological and grammatical relationships between its parts, and between it and other sentences. The former type of content has been referred to as exolinguistic, and the latter as endolinguistic. In terms of this distinction, we may compare the content of music with the endolinguistic content of language. As Springer says, music "lacks 'dictionary' meaning"...; a musical performance does not necessarily have any reference to specific non-musical phenomena. Some pieces of music within a given culture have, to be sure, extra-musical associations for the members of that culture; thus for us a military march may have content related to the emotion of patriotism. But such content is not inherent in the nature of music, as exolinguistic content is inherent in the nature of language. In this respect music is espeically simlar to the language of poetry, which uses endolinguistic relationships of phonology (such as alliteration and rhyme) and of grammar (as in the Gongoristic style of Spanish verse) in a symbolic function, but without specific exolinguistic content. We may thus refer to the similar content structures found in music and in language with the term endosemantic, contrasting with the exosemantic structure which is an essential part of language but not of music. The existence of endosemantic structures in both systems suggests that both may yield to similar techniques of analysis - that basic units of one system may have analogues in the other system.

Here's a passage from the beginning of "Musical Acoustics", by Donald Hall:


Let us confine our attention now to audible sound and consider several contrasting types. Music includes those intentional combinations of sounds that wee choose to hear for esthetic enjoyment and usually depends on an orderly pattern of sounds for its pleasing effect. Speech sounds have much in common with music but differ in their purpose; they communicate the entire range of human ideas through word symbols rather than by conveying emotions directly. Noise is a term sometimes used vaguely to encompass all other sounds, but it means especially those that are unorganized, unpleasant, or unwanted.

The boundary between music and noise, however is not distinct. Each new generation of teenagers seems to like music that its elders hear as headache material. And many a piece now accepted as standard concert fare was considered outrageous when first performed. The riot over Stravinsky's Rite of Spring was an extreme case, but hostile receptions for new musical ideas are actually common. We will adopt the cautious attitude that almost any audible sound may reasonably appear in some composer's music.