Re: Musical conlangs (was: Poetique)

On Thursday, January 8, 2004, at 01:29 AM, John Cowan wrote:
[snip]
>
> Prolong the last (or first, or penultimate) note of each word.  This is
> the analogue of a fixed-stress rule, and is a lot less ugly than pausing
> between words.
Absolutely! And it might actually give the language a bit of a rhythm.

I've checked my info on SolReSol, which are almost all in French, and find
that indeed Jean François Sudre did prescribe pauses after each word.  In
Gajewski's Grammar I read: "Lorseque l'on parle en Solrésol, il faut bien
soin de s'arrèter un peu après chaque mot; cette petit pause est nécessaire
pour ne mèler les mots, afin que lla paersonne qui écoute ne s'embrouille
pas et comprenne facilement."

Ach y fi! It must have produced a horrid jerky irregular staccato effect.
John's suggestion seems so obvious to me that I am surprised neither Sudre
nor other of his fellow Solresolists thought of it.
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On Thursday, January 8, 2004, at 02:55 AM, James Worlton wrote:
[snip]
>
> I know nothing about Solresol other than what as appeared in this
> thread, but I think that limiting the number of notes to 7 is
> impractical linguistically as well as musically.
Yes, so do I. Why Sudre didn't at least go from doh to the doh an octave
above (like the Mercurians :))  I don't know.  But he didn't: only 'do'
through to 'si' (i.e. ti in English).  The restricted range, apparently
equal length notes, and all those pauses must surely have produced the
most unmusical muslang imaginable,

[snip]
> Google search brings up a page that shows 15.) So let's say we create a
> musical conlang with 15 separate notes to represent 15 phonemes. In a
> diatonic setting that would equate to exactly 2 ocatves, which for even
> a non-singer is manageable (but a stretch). If we go with a chromatic
> setting we get a range of a major 9th (forgive the
> musician-geek-terminology here), which should be available to every
> human on the planet with a functioning voice.
Yep - a little more imaginative than Sudre's incomplete major scale.

> Musically, a purely diatonic setting of the phonemes would produce some
> darn-awfully boring 'music'. Likewise a purely chromatic setting would
> produce a Schönbergian sound, which would not appeal to a lot of people.
> So some other musical paramaters would need to come into play.
Exactly - they would have to IMO to produce something more linguistically
practical.

[snip]
> When I teach people how to write a melody I show them that a phrase not
> only consists of notes but also rhythm, articulation, dynamics, timbre,
> and tempo (to name a few :) ), and that they can all be considered
> separate elements; in other words, they can be developed independently.
Interesting.

> However, creating a conlang that assigns all of these separate elements
> to phonemes would create a Milton-Babbit type of total serialism, which
> would appeal to fewer than the Schönbergian result of just using pitch.
Agreed.

> However, they could be utilised to mark dependent clauses, or verb
> aspects/moods/tenses, or possesion, or...
They could indeed - some quite interesting ideas here.

> As I have no interest in creating a musical conlang, I will leave the
> discussion at this point. But hopefully some of this will help those of
> you interested in such a project.
Yes, thanks. I can see that improving my knowledge of the mechanics of
music will have to be one my retirement tasks  :)

Ray
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