Re: Musical conlangs (was: Poetique)

Doug Dee wrote:
> In a message dated 1/7/2004 8:33:02 PM Eastern Standard Time,
> elemtilas@YAHOO.COM writes:
>
>
>>Howdoyouknowhowtodividethissentence?
>
>
> That's easy, because there are 26 letters in the alphabet and hence (for
> example) 17,576 possible 3-letter sequences.  With such a large number of possible
> sequences, most of them will not be actual words, so finding word boundaries
> is easy.  With only 7 notes, as in solresol, there are only 343 different
> 3-note sequences.  It is likely (though I haven't checked) that a very high
> proportion of them will form actual solresol words, so division of a long sequence
> into words will be ambiguous.
>
> (If you use only a small proportion of possible sequences as actual words,
> things are easier, but to "waste" so many of the short sequences would require
> you to make some very long words.)
>
> If you propose a  musical language with 26 notes instead of 7, then the
> problem is considerably reduced -- but other problems are introduced.  I'm not sure
> I could distinguish that many notes when listening to someone play a musical
> conlang.
>
> Doug
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.

To make a correlation with a natlang, what language has the fewest
number of phonemes? (We have also seen this discussion recently.) I
would think that would be a good place to begin. (I have deleted all of
those messages and can't remember Hawaiian's phonology, but a quick
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.

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.

All of the preceeding presupposes an equal-tempered (or other related
type of 12-semitones-to-the-octave) environment. Adding microtones would
increase the number of available elements. I, however, would not like to
have to jump from a C-quarter-sharp to an A-quarter-flat just to produce
the required phonemes for a word.

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.

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.
However, they could be utilised to mark dependent clauses, or verb
aspects/moods/tenses, or possesion, or...

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.
--
=============
James Worlton

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