Re: Music-conlangs & music

On Tue, 4 Jul 2006 20:40:33 +0100, R A Brown <ray@...>
wrote:

>Carsten Becker wrote:
>> 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?
>
>Yes, indeed. Also AFAIK no language, whether a natlang or conlang uses
>timbre in such a way.
>
>I agree with Carsten's points about tone languages, as well as pitch
>accented and stress accented. All this AFAIK I know is well enough
>document. I assume that conlangs that imitate these features behave in a
>similar way.
>
>[snip]
>
>> Carsten
>> ... who has always wanted to do a musical conlang
>
>Join the club   :)
>
>Yep - the subject line explicitly refers to 'music-conlangs'. I thought
>I had made it clear that I was referring to those conlangs that use
>whole ranges of a musical scale of some sort or other. AFAIK there are
>_no_ natlangs that do this.
>
>It seems to me that with such conlangs there are implications regarding
>song & music. Personally I don't think tonal natlangs or pitch accented
>langs are comparable in this respect.
>
>I was rather hoping that there might be a Solresol lurker on the list.
>It seems there isn't {sigh}
Could "music" in Lunarian, Mercurian, Solresol or Eaiea consist of changing
the _timbre_ at which the "words" are pronounced?

In other words, could a song in Solresol (or another "music conlang") have
its "lyrics" be the sequence of pitches and their durations, while
its "music" consisted of the sequence of phonological segments to be
pronounced at those pitches and for those durations? (And of course the
volumes at which they are pronounced would also be part of the "music".)

-----

Some URLs of some relevant conlangs;
http://www.eaiea.com/
http://tinyurl.com/ouxh2
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marooned_on_Mercury
http://www.ptialaska.net/~srice/solresol/intro.htm

Other possibly relevant URLs
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_language
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Musical_languages
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarus_%28language%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silbo
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soundpainting

-----
eldin

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