When I goes in a forest and the wind makes the leaves moves they causes vibrations in the air and when I listen to that it is a bit similar to a musical experience. The same with the sound of rain. Certain birds and certain whales expressed themself through music. Whalles communities have even hit songs and sometime some hit song popular in the Atlantic will later be popular in the pacific and vice versa. Music is related to the movement of the body. Parrot will danse to the sound of rock and roll. We naturally want to danse to the rythm of music. Is it a coincidence? Adding sound to movies, provided that it is done properly, greatly enhance the emotional impact of the movie. Opera where music, poetry and theatre are combined, emotions reached their climax. Musical are my favorite movies. What is this relations to body movement and to emotion? I do not what to go into any details but language is theatrical communication. And any form of expression is a self-enactment of the sense-acting body system (imagination) and enact the self-enacted part of the receiver. A self-enacted dream enact a self-enact dream so it become a common dream. You get draw into music as you get draw into a theatre play as into a dream. And music is touching all the body rythm at the basis of movement, not only of our species. It get into a gigantic amount of knowledge about movement and created all kind of virtual movment into this universe. The musical knowledge is the very structure of our body and musical experience give us access to this. When we listen to music or listen to a theatre play, we gradually get the structure of the story and we anticipate. The feeling is guiding our attention to the developing structure and our resonance to this structure.

Dear Leonid

Of course they are related:

Emotionally,

"Music is the universal language of mankind”

----- Henry Wadsworth

And even more emotionally,

“Music expresses that which cannot be put into words and cannot remain silent”

--- Victor Hugo

Dear Joachim

Very interesting.

I agree that music is not as semantically concrete as language, still every musical phrase creates (reminds, appeals to) a specific emotion. Even if we do not have special words for musical emotions. I think this might be the very purpose of music to create a world of emotions well beyond what language can explicitly name.

What do you think?

Leonid

Dear Joackim,

Thank you for a list of references, I am looking forward to reading them.

Dear Louis

Excellent description of the role of sound in animal world. I did not know about whale hit songs. There are debates about how animal vocalizations relate to human music. An important argument is that species most close to us do not have any musical abilities.

It is an interesting thought that emotions rich climax in opera, which combine music and language. In this regard i do not see principal differences between opera, musical, and other synthetic forms. Opera might be most powerful exactly by unifying those aspects of language and music, which evolution split apart.

Dear Issam,

Excellent quotes. What is their scientific meanings? Can this be understood?

Joachim,

Which hormones do you think determine emotions?

There is a good discussion of emotional mechanisms in

Peter Walla and Jaak Panksepp

Neuroimaging Helps to Clarify Brain Affective Processing Without Necessarily Clarifying Emotions

http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/51761

Panksepp, J. (2011a). Cross-species affective neuroscience decoding of the primal affective experiences of humans and related animals. PloSOne, 6(9).e21236.

Indeed there are emotions of joy related to satisfaction of curiosity, here is an experimental demonstration:

Perlovsky, L. I., Bonniot-Cabanac, M.-C., Cabanac, M. (2010). Curiosity and Pleasure. WebmedCentral PSYCHOLOGY 2010;1(12):WMC001275; http://www.webmedcentral.com/article_view/1275

Stephen Porges, polyvagal theory, uses the connection in his Listening Project.

Music related more parts of brain in one time, to read need more rational attention only, but then is related in all to (but not in one time). I think.

(With music you have "many" more easy, less laborious).

About feelings, emotions... (perhaps future language)

Humpback Whale Songs Spread Eastward Like the Latest Pop Tune

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/04/110414131444.htm

YouTube: Dancing Parrot

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DK15tNhwaZM&feature=fvst

YouTube: Love bird dreaming and singing while sleeping

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DDtxispJhGs

The connection between dreaming and music is key to understand how learning from extended experience over time is the evolutionary source of the invention of dreaming in birds and mammals.

Dear Ana Maria,

Many people might agree with you that music is easier than language. But I am not sure. It depends on the author and composer.

I say easy like less laborious to entrance. But more complete. And I think with more information in one time. (Yes, more difficult like a language).

Louis,

It is a great line about whales! What does it tell us?

Actually not much is known about parrots.

There are data that some birds are as smart as apes - social cognition drives intellect.

Still bird songs do not seem to be like human music in many ways. I do not know about whales.

Joachim,

Thank you for the excellent explanation about the chemistry of emotions, I was slow.

What I would like to understand is "chemistry" of emotions related to knowledge. I think there is near infinity of emotions in human voice and in music. I suspect they are related to different emotions associated with understanding relations between different pieces of knowledge - also near infinity. But there are not nearly enough different chemicals. Any idea?

Birds and Mammal have something in common with us:

They dream, they play, and some of them play music. All of this is related to learning sense-acting behavior over typical situations lasting long period of time.

Dear Louis,

I did not know they dream.

Don't all high animals have dreams?

Dear Leonid,

Only birds and mammal dreams. Only mammal and bird plays in their young age. This is an early form of imagination.

• Sleep patterns in the bird Aratinga canicularis

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0031938488902120

• http://www.improverse.com/ed-articles/richard_wilkerson_2003_jan_evolution.htm

• http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2001/dreaming.html

Language and music are united in being means for the expression of human creativity. (There are others e.g. use of images.) It is often thought that music is universal, but music is as strongly culturally controlled as language, even what counts as tones, as melody etc.

I think we can look this relation in deaf people and their differences with hearing people.

Feel the Music project teaches deaf children a touch of Beethoven

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2012/nov/19/feel-music-deaf-children-orchestra

Studies show musical vibrations can have as much of an impact on the brain as real sounds,

Deafness, he stresses, "is no barrier to making or appreciating music. You can appreciate musicality in a multitude of ways, through vibrations, gestures, body movements, rhythms and by reading music on the printed page."

"When he wrote for the piano, the deaf Beethoven became obsessed with being able to feel the vibrations, so he created lots of trills – the fast repeated notes next to each other. He also used long stretches of pedal to create huge vibrations of sound as well as extreme registers, very high up and low down notes,"

During the Cologne workshop the pianist furnishes the children leaning on and sitting under the piano with plenty of trills and long pedal sections. "When he presses a key, the hammer strikes a string which then vibrates," says Fabian Schurf, 10, who has been profoundly deaf since birth. He stands at the piano resting his arms on the strings. "The feeling runs up my arm and down into my feet. It's all warm and fuzzy, and feels quite good," he says through his teacher in sign language.

Leon Zagrija, nine, who has partial hearing, enjoys the kettle drums best of all. "I feel them in my stomach," he says as the class is asked to spread out and seat themselves randomly between the musicians on the stage. "It makes the hairs on my arms bristle." He later goes to stand by a double bass, clutching the back of the instrument as if he were hugging a large soft toy, and touching the spike on the wooden floor which emits enormous vibrations.

Eight-year-old Teresa Holtkamp, whose hearing was impaired due to numerous infections of the middle ear as a baby, is also drawn to the drums. Her mother, Ulrike, says she has already seen over several years how music therapy has helped to improve her daughter's ability to communicate. "It's enabled her to develop skills of perception and expression. Today listening to the Beethoven she was very aware of when it was joyous and mournful," she says.

I think that spoken language needs sound, and the better enforcement of sound is on music. (Art level of sound).

I think we are immerse in all the sound around us, and we can catch a rhythm to go on, with our brain, our memory, and our life (present). When we stop all kind of sound, we hear the sound of fire, of birds, children around, and we found a cadence too, and continuous in this rhythm. I think we are all time looking for a rhythm to go on. (But I'm not sure).

Warren,

I see the main difference in that language evolution is toward losing emotionality, whereas music evolution is toward being more emotional.

Yet language without emotions loses most of its meanings (except for experts-scientists). Would music be able to compensate for lost emotionality of English? Is this the reason the most songs today are produced by English-speaking vultures? Would our culture survive?

Ana Maria and Louis Brassard

An excellent question and answer!

It is good to know that deaf people could experience music. Is it really as good as real music? Because real people are involved, scientific studies could be considered immoral.

Ana María ,

I agree, I think that prosody of language is essential to connecting sound and meaning.

Leonid,

I find the notion that language is evolving toward losing emotionality strange.

Why do you think that?

Reading too many academic journals? I agree that conceptual language is not emotional and society has a love-affair with science at present. Concrete language and manuals are all the rage too and they remove emotion.

But associative language, metaphorical language, mythic language, universal language: these seem to be all alive and well and often dripping with emotion and other experiences.

I would personally be more comfortable to say that music is experiential rather than emotional. I use the term "emotion" to refer to just one basic form of experience. There are many other forms. Music can convey ideas, passion, images etc.

I come back to being puzzled by your perception of what is evolving. Can you clarify?

Warren,

1) All languages are evolving toward losing emotionality for the following reason: animal voice is highly emotional, it is controlled from ancient involuntary emotional centers. Therefore deliberate conversations are not possible, animals can vocalize only involuntarily. Human language required rewiring the brain so that partly voluntary control over voice is possible.

2) English is an interesting example: it started losing emotionality recently about 400-500 years ago - it is well documented in several books.

3) it is not an effect of science, the causal effect is opposite: science became possible because language became less emotional. In one of my papers I analyzed Leibniz thinking - he could not think unemotionally and therefore Newton discovered science.

4) music has more than emotions, but emotions are the strongest aspect of music and unique to music (this is not only my experience, there is a theoretical background). Also, to say that music has ideas and images is imprecise - aren't ideas better explained by language, and images by visual arts? Therefore what do you really mean?

5) "I come back to being puzzled by your perception of what is evolving. Can you clarify?" I lost you, please ask the question with more details.

Dear Leonid,

I have to defend Leibniz who was much more deep than Newton although his conceptions could not all be expressed in the mathematics of the time but we are getting there.

:"Newton was buried with full honors at Westminster Abbey, Leibniz was accompanied to his grave by only his secretary. But with every passing year, the shadow cast by Leibniz gets larger and larger. "(E. T. Bell, Men of Mathematics, Simon and Schuster, 1937).

Hi Leonid

I find the issue and your line of thinking fascinating.

So I am probably missing something.

Let me take your reply point by point and explain what I don't understand and/or how I view it.

1. Why should conversation being deliberate have any relation to loss of emotionality?

2. I don't understand the sentence. (Can you give me a short reference to read that explains what you are getting at.) English doesn't have emotionality. A person speaking English has emotionality. English does not meaningfully exist apart from its use. I have no evidence or reason to think that people are becoming less emotional: but I do think there has been progress in managing emotions.

3. I would see science as emerging with the evolution of human consciousness. Emotion and its handling is only a tiny part of this.

4. I'm unpersuaded. Bach would take a musical image, and invert it, alter its tempo, write it backwards, put it in different voices etc. It has rather little to do with emotion and yet it creates beauty. See more about "experience" below.

5. It seems evident (to me) that there has been an evolution of human consciousness: ie the human capacity for awareness (which is itself impersonal and unemotional). Part of this evolution involves the understanding and mastery of emotions. That does not mean a loss in their significance and value, much less their disappearance.

As a general point, emotion is one element in the domain of experience. Music does tap into emotion, but it would not even exist if it were not for sensation....a more basic element of experience. To suggest that ideas are "better explained by language" is irrelevant to whether music uses ideas or not. Ideas are another form (or basic element) of experience.

PS. From my psychosocial perspective, function (i.e. human purpose) is what counts. So when we want to use an idea for explanatory purposes, then we move out of the realm of experience and into the realm of inquiry. The idea then has a different function and requires a different name: I use the term "concept". If you want the idea to help you refer to something (i.e. have meaning), then this is another function and requires another word: I use "term" or "name". (Thinking, by the way, is a process of experience that involves multiple basic elements: it is used by inquiry but is not part of inquiry.)

Music has it's own style or way to communicate the feelings. In music, lyrics may or may not present. As in case of instrumental music, lyrics is absent.

Musical composition and rendition of music in specific way  conveys the intended emotions. Perceived emotions and intended emotions can very if listener is unfamiliar with the form of the music. Thus one need to be familiar with musical form or musical language.

About spoken language, words and sentences are used to convey the emotions and they can be presented in particular style to convey specific emotions.

Words and sentences in spoken language are like compositions in the music and presenter adds emotions in this built in structure.   

As almost everybody has said (one way or another) spoken language conveys meaning through symbols, written or spoken in sequence. And music is also a sequence of symbols, usually 'spoken' (not so many actually read music). So could it convey meaning simply because of this coincidence of form? This seems unlikely to work for anyone other than the pitch-perfect who would have to get together and agree on a conventional meaning for each pitch. Apart from this congress being somewhat unlikely, it would - even then - only be of use to the aforementioned pitch perfect.

However, if you consider the musical intervals, not the actual notes themselves, as the principal conveyor in a communicative mechanism then there's much more scope for agreement. Throw concert pitch A at 440Hz at somebody and it's not likely to have any 'meaning-engendering' effect. But throw a perfect fifth (whether as a chord of two notes, or as a sequence of two notes) then almost any human on the planet will recognise that interval and - what's more - perceive it as something pleasant. A minor second interval, on the other hand ... not so great.

Chuck in another note (we're now talking about a 'pitch class set' with three members) - either simultaneously or consecutively - and we might have an instantly recognisable, even to the non-pitch-perfect, major triad which - again - conveys something generally agreeable. Contrast this with another pitch class set of three notes, say a cluster of three adjacent semitones, and you get something arguably (very arguably) universally perceived as disagreeable. (Sometimes a passing dissonance can evoke a fairly common bittersweet, identical, response in people - the Umami, if you will, of music). Furthermore, consonance and dissonance do not require any more technological aids than ordinarily performed language does, so it's at least in with a chance!

In this way, one might suspect that language and music are related, but only in the sense that if language conveys meaning via sequences of symbols then music does so only via sequences of differences between symbols, i.e. that music is a 'derivative' of language (a derivative with respect to time for melody and with respect to space for harmony?). One might then be tempted to say - OK, so instead attach the symbols to the intervals and not the pitches and we can move away from this rather exotic sounding 'gradient' model. But then you'd have to deal with overlapping simultaneous conversations in ordinary language - which, unlike music, tend to work against the facilitation of communication and understanding since everybody talking at once is damn confusing.

Dear Paul and Anne,

I think that the main content of music is emotions. The reason for evolution of this ability is that it helps to overcome cognitive dissonances, with the help of music we can keep contradictory knowledge - this is the essence of culture. Is it possible to prove that music helps to overcome cognitive dissonances? Yes, this is experimentally proved:

Perlovsky, L.I. (2015b). Origin of music and the embodied cognition. Front. Psychol. 6, 538-541; http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00538.

Perlovsky, L.I. (2012b). Cognitive function, origin, and evolution of musical emotions. Musicae Scientiae, 16(2), 185 – 199; doi: 10.1177/1029864912448327.

Perlovsky, L.I. (2013a). A challenge to human evolution – cognitive dissonance. Front. Psychol. 4:179. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00179

http://www.frontiersin.org/cognitive_science/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00179/full

Masataka, N. & Perlovsky, L.I. (2012). The efficacy of musical emotions provoked by Mozart's music for the reconciliation of cognitive dissonance. Scientific Reports 2, Article number: 694 doi:10.1038/srep00694 http://www.nature.com/srep/2013/130619/srep02028/full/srep02028.html

Language main content is  semantics (what is what). The meanings of language sounds exist in surrounding language. Still each individual person must connect sounds to meaning in every words and phrase. This requires motivation = emotion. This is he reason for language prosody melodic-emotional content of speech:

Perlovsky, L.I. (2013c). Language and cognition – joint acquisition, dual hierarchy, and emotional prosody. Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, 7:123; doi:10.3389/fnbeh.2013.00123; http://www.frontiersin.org/Behavioral_Neuroscience/10.3389/fnbeh.2013.00123/full

 Does it make sense?

Leonid

Leonid,

I am sympathetic to the theories of hominin evolution which attribute a common origin to language dance and music as originally totally integrated a communal dancing singing practice for primary social emotional control prior any communication purpose.  One of the oldest human culture is the culture of the Pygmies.  They are modern days hunter gatherer.  Woman teached dance,music and language simultaneous from birth.  They play music while bathing in river tapping in water for percussion.  Their language include imitation of animal sound, mimicing of the animal in dance all integrated into the speach.  

I did not know these details of the  Pygmies culture. Human music is very different from bird's, and I would guess from whale's. For some reason I cannot see your entire message.

Ane,

Content of music is emotions corresponds to 2.a "SUBSTANCE, GIST" ; and 2.b "MEANING, SIGNIFICANCE".

If you would like this to be "the events, physical detail..." - all right, but it is more accurate as I gave above.

Certainly "music does not attempt to convey knowledge like language does", contents of language are mostly semantic, contents of music are mostly emotions.

Music is NOT the language of emotions in a scientific meaning of "language".

"The main content of language is words" - kind of all right,

The language of ideas. Is this correct? - "Language" has several meanings. A sound of a word is certainly a part of language. But it takes several complex mechanisms of the mind to get from sound to an idea. An idea as expressed in language is not the same as the cognitive meaning of this idea. But this is complex and not well understood by many people.  I think It is OK to say that language expresses ideas. 

In the same way there are complex mind mechanisms between sounds of music and emotions. But again, we must simplify otherwise we will loose track of the meaning.

Would it be logical to say "the main content of music is emotions?", Again I would say this is OK.

The "language of tones" - this would be wrong, there is no such thing.

"the main content of language is ideas"  - We areed on this.  

"The language of words" - OK. But "words = ideas", it is not quite right, because it sounds as if it explains something, and this explanation is shallow.

I'll continue later

Leonid

Thank you Anne,

Why tones are related to emotions was a great mystery for millennia. Aristotle asked why music being just sounds reminds us the states of soul. Darwin called it the "greatest mystery".

Leonid

Music is probably the art form that is most universal and the one that emotionally influence us the most.  It is like an emotional hypnotism. Some resist ist power.

''It is a terrible thing, that sonata. And especially that part [i.e. the first movement]. And in general music is a dreadful thing! What is it? I don’t understand it. What is music? What does it do? And why does it do what it does? They say music exalts the soul. Nonsense,it is not true! It has an effect, an awful effect – I am speaking of myself – but not of anexalting kind. It has neither an exalting nor a debasing effect but it produces agitation.How can I put it? Music makes me forget myself, my real position; it transports me to some other position not my own. Under the influence of music it seems to me that I feel what I do not really feel, that I understand what I do not understand... Music carries me immediately and directly into the mental condition in which the man was who composed it. My soul merges with his and together with him I pass from one condition into another,but why this happens I do not know. (Tolstoy 1940, 186).

Some musicians are experimenting playing music with animals

http://www.interspecies.com/

I had a love bird and each time a member of our family was playing plano, he was flying on our shoulder and you could tell he enjoyed it.

Parrot Dancing Gangnam Style

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTl1asCDOgs

 Louis, "Kreutzer Sonata" is a great story. 

Parrot musical abilities are not well studied scientifically.

Leonid

Dear Leonid,

Tolstoy is pointing to the crux of the phenoma of art and music.  He is extremely perceptive of how music is a kind of way by which a composer compels listener to live his/her musical/body experience.  Most other arts demands an effort and a training for this re-enaction of experience to take place but great music almost force you to it.  Some great orators that talk about highly emotional political subject into a war context have this capacity to emotionally hypnotize other where all their criical resistances vanish.  THis is great art and can be extremely dangerous as you know.  Art can be a weapon of ultimate construction or ultimate destruction.

It is interesting.

Tolstoy, if you read carefully, shows that these two people hated each other almost from the very beginning. So what was the role of music?

Leonid

Leonid,

I did not read the Kreutzer Sonata, I only got that except from a google search and I based all my interpretation on what the character says about what music does to him.  I have no clue about what music does in the story . What it does in general is:

''Music makes me forget myself, my real position; it transports me to some other position not my own. Under the influence of music it seems to me that I feel what I do not really feel, that I understand what I do not understand... Music carries me immediately and directly into the mental condition in which the man was who composed it. My soul merges with his and together with him I pass from one condition into another,but why this happens I do not know.''

According to simulation models of theory of Mind, we human when observing another human being or reading a story or listening to music, we re-enact the other.

Anne,

No it is not what I meant to say.  These composers created these musics so that when you listen to their music you will feel as they felt composing it.  So they sent you something that made you experience their experience.  Now the question is what is it in this music that make you feel that way.  What is sent to you are only sound pressure waves.  What is it in you that interpreted these sound pressure?  Yes it is the hearing system, but we are not moved emotionally by natural sound made by non living processes.  We may be moved emotionally by sound of voices expressing suffering or babies crying.  We are emotionally moved when what the sound convey is related to human experience, the one experience listening to the music.  So the question what is the relation with the air wave pressure and human experience; a human experience that the composer through an instrument create an air pressure signal that is such that it will enduced the same experience that is lived while playing.  I have some ideas.  What are yours?

Dear Anne,

There are many philosophical views about space and time.  They are those who take space and time to be the most fundamental realities into which everything else exist and there are those who sees these as usefull human concepts/abstractions but do not attribute any reality to these abstractions outside of their usefullness in our scientific landscaping of the world.   I hold the later view.

About matter, the two views are also different.  In the first view matter is seen as passive and in the later view matter is seen as active.

Since a century now matter has kind of de-materialized and the particules are not as they used to be: localized into a bound limited space and filling space and unchanging.  It mutates, it can be generated from ''emptiness'', and probability waves describe accuratly the behavior of large number of particle but says nothing on individual events involving particles as if all of them are different from each other.

Emotion for highly evolved animals and for humans are felf as positive or negative vis a vis certain situations we are in and ground us into the situations we are in.  But they might exist in more primitive forms of life , these are not necessarily driven by pure automated mechanisms, they may also have feelings evaluating situations they are in and the same reasoning can be push down to even elementary particles.  

And in this view, musical interaction might not be limited to human interactions.

Regards

Dear Anne,

There are many philosophical views about space and time.  They are those who take space and time to be the most fundamental realities into which everything else exist and there are those who sees these as usefull human concepts/abstractions but do not attribute any reality to these abstractions outside of their usefullness in our scientific landscaping of the world.   I hold the later view.

About matter, the two views are also different.  In the first view matter is seen as passive and in the later view matter is seen as active.

Since a century now matter has kind of de-materialized and the particules are not as they used to be: localized into a bound limited space and filling space and unchanging.  It mutates, it can be generated from ''emptiness'', and probability waves describe accuratly the behavior of large number of particle but says nothing on individual events involving particles as if all of them are different from each other.

Emotion for highly evolved animals and for humans are felf as positive or negative vis a vis certain situations we are in and ground us into the situations we are in.  But they might exist in more primitive forms of life , these are not necessarily driven by pure automated mechanisms, they may also have feelings evaluating situations they are in and the same reasoning can be push down to even elementary particles.  

And in this view, musical interaction might not be limited to human interactions.

Regards

Dear Anne,

Here how your thoughts resonate with mines.  I am trying to establish a musical dialogue with you where I modulate my thoughts about music with yours.

There are many philosophical views about space and time.  They are those who take space and time to be the most fundamental realities into which everything else exist and there are those who sees these as usefull human concepts/abstractions but do not attribute any reality to these abstractions outside of their usefullness in our scientific landscaping of the world.   I hold the later view.

About matter, the two views are also different.  In the first view matter is seen as passive and in the later view matter is seen as active.

Since a century now matter has kind of de-materialized and the particules are not as they used to be: localized into a bound limited space and filling space and unchanging.  It mutates, it can be generated from ''emptiness'', and probability waves describe accuratly the behavior of large number of particle but says nothing on individual events involving particles as if all of them are different from each other.

Emotion for highly evolved animals and for humans are felf as positive or negative vis a vis certain situations we are in and ground us into the situations we are in.  But they might exist in more primitive forms of life , these are not necessarily driven by pure automated mechanisms, they may also have feelings evaluating situations they are in and the same reasoning can be push down to even elementary particles.  

And in this view, musical interaction, sharing of feelings, mutual resonating, might not be limited to human interactions.  

Regards

There are for musical languages in the World

1. Voodooistic tradition. It's based of physiological rhythmes and used most commonly in African tradition music. Cause it works bypassing consciousness, it's available for all people. That's why it's wide used in modern popular music too (rhythms, extreme vocals)

2. European harmony. Pythagoras prooved, that harmony laws are based on the mathematical foundation. Some of them can be explained by modern cognitive psychology (some psychoacoustical effects such as recognition and masking, e.g.). That's why this language is most popular.

3. Oriental harmony. This harmony is based on another solution of the same mathematical tasks as european one, but it's less popular, it's used in either authentic oriental music or in modern music as an exotic color. I consider two reasons for this: oriental solution is less powerful in reflecting feelings, that European; additionally, it can be caused by the world expansion of European culture, academism. Even in oriental popular music European harmony is usually used.

4. Dodekaphony. This is the artificial language designed without taking into account the psychology. That's why it's olny available for people who know its theory. It differs from other world music languages in the same way as programming languages differ from natural languages. I know only one precedent of using it in popular music, as a parody.

Ludwig Van Beethoven:

‘’When I open my eyes I must sigh, for what I see is contrary to my religion, and I must despise the world which does not know that music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy, to wine which inspires one to new generative processes, and I am the Bacchus who presses out this glorious wine for manking and makes them spiritually drunken.  When they are again become sober they have drawn from the sea all that they brought with them, all that they can bring with them to dry land.  I have not a single friend; I must live alone.  But well I know that God is nearer to me than to other artists; I associate with him without fear; I have always recognized and understood him and have no fear for my music – it can meet no evil fate;  Those who understand it must be freed by it from all the miseries which the others drag about with themselves.’’

‘’Then from the focus of enthusiasm I must discharge melody in all directions;  I pursue it, capture it again passionately; I see it flying away and disappearing in the mass of varied agitations; now I seize upon it: - behold, a symphony! Music, verily, is the mediator between intellectual and sensuous life;  I should like to talk with Goethe about this – would he understand me?’’

  … ‘’tell him to hear my symphonies and he will say that I am right in saying that music is the one incorporeal entrance into the higher world of knowledge which comprehends manking but which mankind cannot comprehend … We do not know what knowledge brings us.  The encased seed needs the moist, electrically warm soil to sprout, to think, to express itself.  Music is the electrical soil in which the mind thinks, lives, feels.  Philosophy is a precipitate of the mind’s electrical essence; its needs which seek a basis in a primeval principle are elevated by it, and although the mind is not supreme over what it generates through it, it is yet happy in the process.  Thus every real creation of art is independent, more powerful than the artist himself and returns to the divine through its manifestation.  It Is one with man only in this, that it bears testimony of the mediation of the divine in him .. Everything electrical stimulates the mind to musical , fluent, out-streaming generation.’’

The Life of Ludwig Van Beethoven

By A. Wheeloc, T. H. Deiters, H. Riemann

Dear Anne,

This Beethoven even his discourse is a  music that goes straight to our hearth.

 I agree Anne, Louis passage about Beethoven is very good, Eddie is right, a lot more is known now. I'd like to comment on my group research. In few words, Language is mostly directed at semantic knowledge; which objects and events are important among the infinite continuity of the world, and how these entities are related.

Music creates our ability for aesthetic emotions, emotions related to knowledge. We need these emotions in order to keep in mind and understand  contradictory knowledge, cognitive dissonances. Because usually we discard contradictions. Without music knowledge will not accumulate.

In language every word potentially contradicts what we already know. To keep in mind new words, to discard not  the knowledge immediately, there is emotional prosody, the melody of speech. Usually it is below consciousness. Especially in English, which possibly is the least emotionally-sounding language (due to certain grammatical changes since the 17th c.). 

Maybe current events in our culture are related to this low emotionality of English: words are losing their traditional values, and so is our culture. This process to some extent is compensated by pop songs. There might be more pop-songs in English than in any other language, At the same time the low emotionality makes English a powerful language for science and engineering. 

Leonid,

''Especially in English, which possibly is the least emotionally-sounding language''

I think the sad palm would go to French, 

Very interesting Louis, thank you.. I suspected this about French, but did not know enough.

Leonid,

Don't take my opinion as one of an expert.  I will simply give you three reasons why I think it is the case.

1. Ask singers that sing in different languages including French and they will tell you that French is less easy for signing.

2. French is the first European language of the Enlightment and the Academy Francaise and the Frech admistritrative, intellectual, aristocratic class totally modified it for itself  and it was not a democratic age to say the least. Everybody speak French in France today but previous to the French revolution only the elite and the people of Paris and a small number in Canada and colonies spoke that language.  It became the language of the French people only through rigourous uniform schooling imposed by the French revolution.  

3. I was borned into a society that was isolated for 300 years from France and that became mostly illeterated except for a very small clerical elite.  The language of the street I learned in my youth was very different from the French I learned in school.  The French I learned in school is the language spoken in France and it is cold and rational , because we did not learn their street language and swears and all that, but the language of my grand parents and my language was not that emotionally cold.  Emotional expression were more easily expressed through it than in the very formal French language. Languages carries a cultural history within it. They are not neutral vehicles of expression.

Dear Anne,

A simple argument about music and knowledge contradictions are popular songs: most songs are about contradictions: unrequited love, betrayals, etc. We like these songs because they help us to overcome life difficulties. Why do we like sad music? It helps us to overcome sad aspects of life.

We can process contradictions without music, because for 2 million years music has helped us to develop emotions that we use for this purpose. You can read my papers with Masataka and Cabanac which proved this idea experimentally (these papers are open and available free).

Best,

Leonid

Anne,

Not at all.  You gave a more positive portrait of the French canadians.  My point was the spoken french of my ancestors was not the emotionally cold language of the modern French we hear in France or on TV in Canada.  

Hi Leonid,

you can approach music and language similarities/differences from an intentionality point of view. One important difference is that music conveys emotions, but are not necessarily aligned with those felt by the performer (e.g., one can be sad and play happy music, and vice versa), while in language emotional prosody reflects the emotional state of the speaker, and i guess it’s hard to fake it.

You can approach this issue with help from the sign quality (i.e., indexes, icons, and symbols) of both language and music. In the paper attached, from an evolutionary perspective, the two systems are paralleled and there is not a clear cut division, unless make a comparison from the pragmatic level, which basically divides one system to convey emotional content and the other one to convey referential meaning.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/269333811_Symbolizing_Iconic_Indexes_An_Intentionality-based_Hypothesis_on_the_Emergence_of_Music

Here also a paper on music and language similarities, with a part devoted to “why it is useless to compare them”.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/303882151_A_Language-Based_Approach_to_Music_and_Intertextuality

PS: sorry, it looks like I’m spamming stuff :-)

Article Symbolizing Iconic Indexes: An Intentionality-based Hypothes...

Chapter A Language-Based Approach to Music and Intertextuality