Music & Language Studies

NETTL, Bruno. “Some Linguistic Approaches to Musical Analysis.” Journal of the International Folk Music Council 10 (1958): 37-41.

This article focuses on possible approaches to classifying music in terms of segmental elements, along the lines of linguistic analysis of the day.

Music consists of various elements, such as pitch, rhythm and harmony, each of which is, in analysis, divided into small units or segments such as tones, note-values, intervals, or chords. To put these elements into a form analogous to phoneme segments, corresponding to consonants and vowels, creates a problem of interpretation which may be solved in at least two ways. (1) A separate set of phonemes could be set up for each element. We would have pitch phonemes (tones), rhythmic phonemes (note values), harmony phonemes (chords), etc. Longer segments in music, structure phonemes, could be included. (2) The other alternative is to consider a piece of music analogous to a speech utterance, and each element of music could be analogous to a different level of phoneme in the same system. For example pitch phonemes could be considered analogous to vowels and consonants. (38-39).

Since rejected by the author as naïve (personal communication), this is one of the earliest attempts to find common ground between the modern fields of music and linguistics. While I would agree that the specific points of his method are flawed, it is not a fruitless enterprise to ascertain in what ways music and language correlate, and in what ways they differ. Although this article does not address issues of cognitive processing, such preliminary comparisons between musical and linguistic elements are essential to develop well-formed questions for further research. As Monrad-Krohn (1947) discovered, even when features of singing and speaking appear to correspond, there may be fundamental differences in the underlying brain processes which control them.