There’s enough popular media dancing around the same topic, I want to take a crack at it. Here is some preliminary content before I start:
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Mark Rober This Piano Speaks English: Mark makes a specific point that the piano’s “voice” would be almost impossible to understand without providing subtitles. Visual information forces us to hear sounds a certain way.
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Adam Neely: This BPM is trash, and here’s why: This is more about tempo, but Adam makes the important point that having sheet music might force a particular interpretation: “Notation doesn’t tell you how the music sounds”
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Music in the Brain, a summary of the main finding from this journal article (Laboratory for Computational Audition at MIT). In short, when people were presented with all sorts of sounds and music while in an MRI, different brain areas were better activated by specific types of sound. One brain area selected speech, one area selected music.
My question is, if you repeat that experiment in #3 but provide sheet music for all sounds, would the “music selecting” part of the brain light up? And what is the implication for that?
Perhaps with the “context” of sheet music, anything can be construed as music. This would be supported historically by wind machines in classical music, the movie August Rush, etc. Is it simply a flaw/feature of human perception that we perceive the musicality of things, like how we see faces in inanimate objects and shapes in clouds? There’s good research about combing visual and auditory stimuli, delaying one modality, or purposely using the wrong sound for a face. It hasn’t been applied to music or sheet music as far as I know.
The opposite extreme is that nothing is intrinsically music. Better yet, “music” as a word is insufficient as a description. Opera, symphony, TV theme song, transcription, remix, TikTok sound, all of these are better descriptors. Each one has a set of rules, limitations, and use cases for the music they employ.
There’s a popular saying/belief that music is a universal language. Every culture and society creates and performs music, according to a study from the Harvard Music Lab, full paper here.
But I think music is the opposite of a universal language, hence the catchy title. The Music Lab’s results are still valid. Their study found types of universal songs: Love, Dance, Lullaby, and Healing. But claiming that these similarities make music a universal language is effectively the same as using western classical music notation to make everything into music. Each society has their own words for love, dance, lullaby, and healing too. They can be translated, but not universally combined.
Music is not one universal language. It is every language, it is speech.
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In my google searches, I came across this great article by Line Grenier in the Canadian University Music Review, which ends as follows: For as Antoine Hennion has rightly said: “It is not up to sociology, to social relations as we know them, to come and explain to us the meaning (or non-meaning) of music, it is more up to music to reveal to us an unknown social world”.
