Re: Music-conlangs & music

On Tue, 4 Jul 2006 20:40:33 +0100, "R A Brown"
<ray@...> said:
> Carsten Becker wrote:
>
> [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.
Do you mean particular modes (like Major, Minor, Dorian, Locrian, etc.)?
Given the different 'absolute' pitch ranges of everyone's voices, esp.
between male and female, I think this would be the most effective way to
go about it--since the quality of the scale/mode can be produced on
*any*
tonic. Otherwise, you would have to deal with absolute pitch, and that
would exclude most of the population. OTOH, if everyone in the society
had absolute pitch, (and the same vocal range...), your group of
phonemes
would be quite a bit larger, assuming a vocal range of two and a half
octaves.

--------
James W.
The composer on the list who has no desire whatsoever to create a
musical conlang.

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