Re: Music-conlangs & music

From: "Eldin Raigmore" <eldin_raigmore@...>
Sent: Tuesday, July 04, 2006 12:40 AM

> Timbre is essentially what distiguishes one phoneme from
> another, or at least one "phone" from another; at any
> rate it is what distinguishes one vowel from another.
>
> But there is more to timbre than that; timbre is also
> part of what distinguishes one person's voice from
> another's.
Given that there is a musical language that distinguishes
timbre -- if you played it on, say, a recorder, how would
you imitate the typical sound of a violin when the "word"
requires it? Likewise, it is sometimes easy to imitate the
*speech* characteristics of a person regarding speed,
accent/dialect, lexicon and grammar use, speech defects and
such, but you can never copy their actual *voice* with all
its characteristics.

> Tonal languages have "lexical tone".  Can one sing in
> these languages?  The answer is quite evidently "yes".
> How, and why, can one sing in these languages?  I
> think the question is worth a good answer.
I have read that Chinese mostly disregards tone in songs.

> Do the words, in some respect and to some degree,
> determine the pitches at which they can be sung?
Sometimes they try to consider tone, but not always.

> Finally there are languages -- English among them -- in
> which the volume at which a syllable is pronounced can
> change the meaning of the words.
>
> English is not the best example, because length, pitch,
> and volume all go together to make up "stress" in
> English.  But try to imagine two words, the noun "RECord"
> and the verb "reCORD", pronounced in a monotone and with
> exactly equal length of both syllables.  It would still be
> possible to distinguish, because the accented syllable
> would be louder than the unaccented; it would be harder
> to distinguish, because we are used to the accented
> syllable being at a higher pitch and longer duration than
> the unaccented.
It's not only loudness, pitch and length that make stress in
English. You took the word <record> as an example -- the
verb is [r\i."k_hO:d] for me, while the noun is
["r\E.k_h@_-d] (not YAEPT please!) -- that is, I have even
different vowels there: [i] vs. [E] and [O] vs. [@_-] (or
is it [@\]? I don't know, something like [@], but not quite
[@] ... anyway)

Carsten
... who has always wanted to do a musical conlang

--
"Miranayam kepauarà naranoaris." (Kalvin nay Hobbes)
Venena, Rayam 15, 2315 ya 10:03:04 pd

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