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Re: Musical conlangs (was: Poetique)

From:Ray Brown <ray.brown@...>
Date:Thursday, January 8, 2004, 19:45
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. ======================================================================= 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 =============================================== http://home.freeuk.com/ray.brown ray.brown@freeuk.com (home) raymond.brown@kingston-college.ac.uk (work) =============================================== "A mind which thinks at its own expense will always interfere with language." J.G. Hamann, 1760

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Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...>