Any language you choose to indulge in

A blog I read recently linked to two really fascinating discussions of music. Here’s a brief summary, for the interested.

Why does French music sound French? Because the composers spoke French!

Why is Elgar’s music for Land of Hope and Glory so quintessentially English, while Debussy sounds so French? It is all because the music mimics the composer’s native language, say scientists.
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They analysed recordings of sentences spoken in typical French and English, and compared the rhythms and variations in pitch, or melody.

They found that English had more of a swing than French, a rhythm produced by a tendency in English to cut some vowels short while stressing others. The melodies of the two languages also differed, with pitch varying far more in spoken English than French.

The team then did the same kind of analysis on music, comparing the rhythm and melody of English classical music from composers such as Elgar, Holst and Vaughan Williams, with that of French composers including Debussy, Fauré and Roussel. “The music differs in just the same way as the languages,” said Dr Patel. “It is as if the music carries an imprint of the composer’s language.”
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Dr Patel, who was speaking at the Acoustical Society of America meeting in San Diego yesterday, now hopes to investigate whether pianists from different countries impose elements of their language on pieces they play – the equivalent of playing the piano with an accent. “Pianists do interpret music differently, and language might play a part”.

And here‘s another fun discussion, this one on the origin of the chromatic scale:

Schwartz, Howe, and Purves analyzed a vast selection of speech sounds from a variety of languages to reveal the underlying patterns common to all utterances. In order to focus only on the raw sound, they discarded all theories about speech and meaning and sliced sentences into random bites. Using a database of over 100,000 brief segments of speech, they noted which frequency had the greatest emphasis in each sound. The resulting set of frequencies, they discovered, corresponded closely to the chromatic scale. In short, the building blocks of music are to be found in speech.

I don’t know nearly as much about music as a couple of the people who read here, do. I’d be interested in what they have to say. My only comment for now: this is really fascinating.