Re: Music-conlangs & music

Hi Ray,

On Fri, 30 Jun 2006 R A Brown wrote:
>
> In a mail the other day Sally mentioned the 16th century conlang
> 'Lunarian', which features in Francis Godwin's "The Man in the Moone",
> and is a language based on musical staves.
>
> In the 1950s in the UK the "Eagle" comic has stories on 'Dan Dare, pilot
> of the future' and his romps around the solar system. On Mercury, they
> were strange, very tall humanoids who spoke/sang a language in which
> only the five canonical vowels occurred. But they used the whole major
> scale from doh to top doh (thus there were 40 basic syllables - the
> language also BTW was verbless  :)
>
> Unfortunately, I didn't keep any record of the language & altho I've
> searched hard on the Internet, I can find nothing more about it. A pity
> really - as it did provoke an interest in the possibility of a 'music
> conlang' which has been there at the back of my mind ever since.
>
> In between Lunarian and 'Mercurian', we find Solresol, developed by Jean
> François Sudre in the early 19th century. This used just the notes: doh,
> re, mi, fa, so, lah, ti (do, re, mi, fa, so, la, si). Thus the language
> could sung, hummed, whistled etc. This language was remarkable not only
> in abandoning the vowels & consonants of natlangs, but in becoming AFAIK
> the first auxlang to actually attract a following and be used. I
> understand there are still some enthusiastic adherents of the language.
>
> A similar idea to Solresol is Bruce Koestner's Eaiea (1990), but that
> uses all twelves notes of the chromatic scale.
>
> What I want to know is how this affects the notion of 'songs' in the
> language. Is every poem, in fact, a song - even tho the tune may not be
> very tuneful! Are there Solresol _songs_? Does anyone know.
>
> It must also, surely, have implications for music in those languages,
> since any sequence of notes (at least in the major scale) will
> correspond to actual words in the language, even tho the resultant words
> make give nonsense as regards meaning.
>
> I don't suppose we have any Solresol user on the list?
Ray,

Thanks for the trip down Memory Lane.  My parents
thought "Eagle" a suitable comic for a growing lad;
to them, "Beano" and "Dandy" were just rubbish.
(Though I vastly preferred some of their stories.)

I thought Dan Dare a bit gung ho at the time; PC 49
was more to my taste, along with Sir Percy Vere,
Cornelius Dimworthy and Harris Tweed.  Still, my
mental image of "aliens" for years after was based
almost entirely on the Mekon - and I  have never
been able to understand claims that "everyone's
archetypal alien is the kind of figure associated
with the Roswell incident".  Grey skin, indeed!
Everyone knows that the aliens'skin is green! ;-)
Likewise, those funny things the USA and USSR later
sent into space couldn't have been real rockets - they
didn't have a glass nose cone ...

Anyone who misssed out on the fun can get a good
rundown of the Eagle's history, illustrated!, at:
http://tinyurl.com/oq3kx

I was really hopeful of finding out a bit more about
the sung Mercurian language , and so I too, searched
high and low for descriptions of it on the internet.

I found only this:
http://home.ccil.org/~cowan/conlang/con9603
of any great interest.  Turns out it's YOUR post
to CONLANG of 22 Feb 1996 - over 10 years ago!
seeking info on the same topic ... ;-)

There was also:
http://tinyurl.com/mw5nn
which is the Amazon listing for Titan Books' 2005
reprint of "Marooned on Mercury".

Finally, there was a reference to Chad Varah, the
scriptwriter for "Marooned on Mercury", who
"... wrote a series of sheets explaining how the
language worked".  The link is at Nicholas Hill's
"Dan Dare" page:
http://tinyurl.com/omo5u
I'd dearly like to see those sheets ...

Varah had a fertile imagination.  [OT: He eventually
started the Samaritans, the first telephone suicide
counselling service anywhere, staffed by volunteers,
which eventually became the international
Befrienders society.  Interestingly, it's totally non-
denominational, even though Varah was an Anglican
clergyman.  He initially was going to offer personal
counselling, as a chaplain, to everyone who needed
it, but discovered that the simple act of someone
(a volunteer) just listening to a desperate person
in itself made a profound difference to their frame
of miind.  So he trained more volunteers and "the
rest is history".  Great man.  See:
http://tinyurl.com/oct9v]


You wrote:
> What I want to know is how this affects the notion of 'songs' in the
> language. Is every poem, in fact, a song - even tho the tune may not be
> very tuneful! Are there Solresol _songs_? Does anyone know.
This kind of scheme almost guarantees that almost
every utterance is a *bad* song!  Whether we use
12 semitones or 7 diatonic notes, a full octave is too
large a range for most human voices in the course of
a normal day's speech.  Many of us don't exceed,
and some don't even attain, a half an octave in range.
Further, the pitch alterations we make in normal
speech can be quite slight, and very subtle when
compared with a full semitone.  The better we know
our interlocutor, the smaller the tonal inflection
need be to convey a wealth of meaning.  I'm almost
convinced that any workable sung language would
need to be microtonal, with probably many more
than just 12 discrete pitches to the octave.  At a
guess, I'd hazard that we could all readily distinguish
at least 30, and possibly 40, different pitches in that
range.  Another thing is that we all have different
natural speaking ranges.  So pinning meanings to
absolute pitches is probably a mistake; it's the
relative pitches that presently convey meaning, both
in tonal and "non-tonal" languages.

OT:  Which leads me to another point entirely: I think
for effective representation of the nuances of spoken
language, I should like to see a "bi-linear" (possibly
trilinear or quadrilinear) writing system (not Sai's non-
linear fully two-dimensional w.s.), as follows:

0.  The zeroth line would be a (clock or relative) timeline.
1.  The first line would contain point-of-articulation
(POA) data.
2.  The second line would contain manner-of articu-
lation (MOA) data.
3.  The third line would contain the pitch data (melody).
4.  The fourth line would contain stress data.

One element on any line might cover one *or more
or less than one* element on any other line.


> It must also, surely, have implications for music in those languages,
> since any sequence of notes (at least in the major scale) will
> correspond to actual words in the language, even tho the resultant words
> make give nonsense as regards meaning.
My first thought was that such a language would
preclude the possiblilty of an independent art of
music.   However, given that a speech range may
be much less than a singing range, it should still
be possible to have "utterances" as microtonal
melismas, or vocal ornaments, around various
musical resting points, eg the tonic and dominant
notes of a diatonic scale.  In such a music, unlike
ours, no music would be completely free of verbal
associations, I think.

Thanks you for an interesting time of speculation.
Now to bed, so I can work tomorrow!

Regards,
Yahya

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