The Relationship between Music and Language
Music and Language are two significant features of human nature.
Language, in the sense of spoken word-based language with complex syntax, is the fundamental thing that makes us human, and which most clearly distinguishes us from all non-human animals.
Music is a thing that seems to be unique to the human species, although uncertainty about what music actually is makes it difficult to be sure that other non-human animals don’t have some kind of “music” that is somehow equivalent to human music.
Biological Function
The biological function of language seems fairly obvious – it is a means of communication, and compared to forms of communication that non-human animals use, it is capable of expressing a very wide range of arbitrarily complex and abstract meanings.
Defining “communication” as a biological functionality is potentially simplistic, because biological functionality relates to the long-term reproductive success of individuals, and communication necessarily involves interaction between at least two distinct individuals. So a full explanation of how a system of communication counts as biological functionality has to consider the biological benefits to both the sender and receiver of any particular communicative signal.
In the case of music, it is not obvious that it has any biological function at all. In the modern world music mostly seems to be a form of entertainment, something that makes us “feel good” in various situations.
However music does definitely exist as a thing, and it is found in some form in all cultures, and we know that our ancestors were making flutes over 40,000 years ago.
Also we can readily observe that both the production and consumption of music have a measurable cost (even if it’s just the cost of the time spent listening to music), so it can’t just exist for no particular reason.
Theoretical biology tells us that if an organism’s behaviour that has a cost but no corresponding benefit, then evolution by natural selection should cause that behaviour to disappear.
So whatever music is or isn’t, it must have something to do with some type of biological functionality. Perhaps it solved some biological problem in the past, but no longer does so in the modern world. Or perhaps it somehow exists as a side-effect of something else that is or was an adaptation providing biological functionality.
Song Lyrics
In terms of our understanding of biological functionality, language and music are almost opposites – with language it is very obvious what the functionality is, whereas with music it’s hard to tell if it has any biological function at all.
If a person lacks the ability to communicate by spoken language (or some equivalent substitute like sign language if they happen to be deaf, for example), then that person is obviously disabled, and they will not be able to survive as an independent adult in any human society (let alone get a partner and have children and raise them properly).
There exist people who are not musical. These people can be considered to be musically “disabled”, but as far as we know non-musical people are quite capable of surviving and prospering in the world. (Although, as far as I know, this is not something that has been fully investigated in a scientific manner.)
And yet, although language and music seem like they are very different things, there is a very strong relationship between them.
The most obvious relationship is when natural spoken word-based language content is embedded in the music. In other words, song lyrics.
Of course we know that music does not have to contain any words. We also generally observe that language content embedded in music is not quite the same as “normal” spoken language.
A fuller description of the observed relationship between music and spoken language can be summarized as follows:
- Music does not need to contain any words at all.
- But, almost all of the most popular music is song, where the main melody of the musical item consists of words, ie lyrics.
- Normal speech has both “melody” and “rhythm”, however the melody and rhythm of normal speech lacks the precise regularities of musical melody and musical rhythm.
- The spoken content embedded in music normally has musical melody and musical rhythm, but sometimes it only has musical rhythm (ie rap) and occasionally it has neither (so it is effectively speech accompanied by a musical background).
- The actual content of song lyrics is very recognisable as language content, yet there are consistent differences between the nature of language in song lyrics and the nature of language in normal spoken language.
- There are some things that happen in the performance of song lyrics that would never happen in normal
conversational speech.
Differences and Similarities between Lyrics and Normal Speech
The main intention of this article is to identify the consistent differences between song lyrics and “normal” speech, on the assumption that the nature of these differences may provide vital clues in our quest to understand the mystery of music.
However non-differences are also important, ie those characteristics of normal speech that always (or almost always) apply to song lyrics, and these observed non-differences may also give us important clues.
Non-Differences
There are many differences between song lyrics and “normal” spoken language.
But there are also certain ways in which song lyrics and normal spoken language are not different:
- Syntax: the syntax of song lyrics is almost always completely valid. (This stands in contrast with the semantics of song lyrics, which can sometimes be somewhat nonsensical.)
- Valid words within syntactical content: song lyrics can contain non-verbal vocalisations, and some of these vocalisations do sound a bit like series of nonsense words. However song lyrics never contain individual nonsense words within actual sentences.
Comedic Songs
A certain portion of songs are comedy songs, and in many cases the comedy involves flouting the normal conventions and expectations that we have about how songs should work.
This has the potential to confound our attempts to determine what are the normal rules that define music and song lyrics.
For example one might identify a certain “rule” that seems to apply to almost all song lyrics, and then one thinks of an obvious exception, but, when you listen to that song, you realise that it is actually a comedic song, where the comedy is based on that very rule being broken.
In the first instance we should not allow the comedic breaking of a rule to confuse our understanding of what the rules actually are.
Nevertheless, if we observe that the rule is only ever broken in a comedy song, then this adds to the general evidence that it is indeed a rule in the normal (non-comedy) case.
The Differences
The following is a list of things that occur more often in song lyrics than in normal spoken language.
Some of them almost always occur in song lyrics, and almost never in conversational speech.
Some occur often but not always in song lyrics, and not very often in normal speech.
- Rhyming - when the ends of words at the ends of different lines have the same sounds, even though they are not the same words. In rap there is more rhyming, sometimes much more than just one rhyme at the end of the line. Most song lyrics do rhyme, although there are a few that don’t, and sometimes not all the lines in a song end in a rhyme.
- Abstraction and Metaphor - song lyrics often describe emotional situations in vague and abstract terms, and never actually get into any details. I count metaphor as a particular form of abstraction, because a metaphor is typically using language applicable to one situation A when talking about some other situation B – and this generally only makes sense due to abstract similarities between situation A and B. So if effect the metaphor is saying something abstract about situation B. Sometimes the word “like” is included, and then it’s a simile, but the same logic applies, and it’s a de facto form of abstraction.
- Non-verbal vocalisations. Non-verbal vocalisations can occur within normal speech, in particular they can be fillers like “um”, or interjections like “ooh” or “aargh”. However in normal speech these vocalisations are usually short and only one syllable. In a song they can be multi-syllabic and they can be arbitrarily long (the extreme case being that it’s the whole song, but in that situation it doesn’t really count as being lyrics).
- Repetitions - repetitions of words, phrases (and other sentence fragments) and whole sentences. One particular special type of repetition is repetition of the beginning of a sentence or phrase, where the ending is different each time. This type of repetition almost never occurs in conversational speech.
- Semi-nonsensical - there are some song lyrics where it is rather hard to tell what the song lyrics actually “mean”, even though there may be some alleged meaning that is intended by the author of the song. Sometimes the nonsense involves using the right words in the “wrong” place, in a manner that doesn’t strictly make sense, but which still relates to or describes the situation that the song is about.
- Multiple singers - this is not a difference in the content of song lyrics, but it is a difference in how the lyrics are presented, because conversational speech is never spoken by multiple speakers simultaneously – it just can’t be.