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Re: Music-conlangs & music

From:Carsten Becker <carbeck@...>
Date:Tuesday, July 4, 2006, 13:34
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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R A Brown <ray@...>