Denoting the Voice: Text and Context in Music and Language
Denoting the Voice: Text and Context in Music and Language
Jonathan G. Secora Pearl
Fellowship proposal, submitted to the NEH
The Problem
Charles Darwin was wrong, at least about music. In “The Descent of Man,” he wrote: “As neither the enjoyment nor the capacity of producing musical notes are faculties of the least use to man in reference to his daily habits of life, they must be ranked amongst the most mysterious with which he is endowed.” (Darwin, C. 2004 [1879]: 636) One might have expected more, knowing his wife Emma was a fine pianist, who in her youth had studied in Paris with Frédéric Chopin. Generations of scholars, from outside the field of music, have compared it to other human behaviors, and found it lacking, a mere artifice, insubstantial, ornamental, irrelevant. Some have dismissed it as a byproduct of something ostentibly more useful to the species, like language. (Pinker, S. 1997: 528) To hold that music is useless, but that language is not, one must understand how they differ. It is a simple thing to claim they are not alike, but far harder in practice to define the ways. Music and language remain twin aspects of civilization, found in all known human cultures, across time and place, embracing us from our earliest days until the ends of our lives. Speaking and singing are found everywhere and everywhen. Wherein lies the distinction?
The greatest difficulty in answering this foundational question is that we are often deceived by written forms of music and language into believing our object dwells within them, rather than in the sounds that inspire them. On the page, they appear far more distinct than they do in sound.Text without context is a world without air; yet context alone remains the unanalyzable chaos of everyday experience. The trick is to find the balance between too much detail, and too little. Most important is a self-reflective understanding of the specifics regarding what each system captures and what it leaves out. Standard Western music notation gives preference to pitch classes and length, dealing more with intention than with execution. Written language may highlight phonetic details and word order at the expense of intonation and timing. Comparing music and language in these forms is speaking at cross-purposes.
Text and Context
The project I propose is one of refining the practice of transcription and notation, in particular how they deal with pitch and timing, and secondarily with timbre, aspects common to music and language. A common vocabulary and methodology which would permit us to identify similarities and differences is lacking. No attempt has ever yet been made to address the considerations of both disciplines at once, to enable us finally to compare musical and linguistic materials on an even footing. The result of this project will be a common language and set of techniques, for rendering text from context.
The questions of accuracy and authenticity are part and parcel to performance practice and reception history, but have little been discussed in terms of the transference from sound to writing to performance. How accurately does the text of notation reflect the context of sound that initially inspires it? How authentically can sound be reproduced from this secondary source of score and transcript? No one system of writing will capture all and only the essential items. Each system is but a lens or filter through which the materials pass. The present project will contribute concrete definitions to the process of rendering sound into writing, permitting a conscious acknowledgment of the assumptions which are inherent to the enterprise.
Western music notation describes duration in relative terms, with note values holding a theoretical ratio to each other, dealing principally with intended values, rather than the ones which are realized in performance. Linguistic systems sometimes identify vowel lengths: short, long, even overlong (as in Estonian), without regard to their actual lengths in speech. Acoustics permits us to measure the absolute values, in millisecond for example. Yet these measures alone tell us little of the lengths that we perceive.
Musical scores force the choice of particular pitch classes, yet performance is free to veer from these absolutes, producing “blue notes” for instance, that lie between the pitch classes defined by convention.Various systems for describing intonation in speech have been used, but most have forced similar though less fine-toothed choices of pitch, prefering relative descriptors of height (high/low), or more general descriptions of contour (rise-fall, fall-rise, level). Both the specific and the more general approaches can be fruitfully applied to both materials (describing musical contours and linguistic melodies) permitting different levels of analysis and comparison. As the ethologist, Frans de Waal, recently put it: “We cannot afford to look through a single pair of glasses; we need lots of different glasses to see reality.” (de Waal, 2001: 182)
Historical Background
For some, the boundary between music and speech has surely been less than clear. Many musicians have noted a fascination with the musical surface of language: Modest Mussorgsky, Edward Elgar, Steve Reich, Pauline Oliveros; perhaps foremost among these was the composer and pedagogue, Leoš Janáček (1854- 928), who spent more than thirty years eavesdropping on conversations, transcribing the flow of speech, as easily, indeed more voluminously, than he transcribed folk song. (Pearl, J., 2005; Pearl, J., in press) His practice, in theory, was simple: he wrote speech in music. He was not alone in the attempt to bridge music and language through notation. Joshua Steel (1700-1791) had set out to devise a notational system based in musical practice, to capture the nuances of theatrical performance. (Kassler, J. , 2005). Duncan Gardiner (1980) proposed such a technique for spoken Czech, citing the work of van Schooneveld on Russian intonation as inspiration (pp. x-xi).
Music throughout the ages has toyed with the border between speech and song. Medieval chant begins as prayer and recitation, becomes formalized, codified, turned music. Recitative in Baroque and Classical opera stands between singing proper and spoken text. Sprechstimme and Sprechgesang are indications to stretch the gap between music and language. But musicians are not alone in their explorations between these two fields. Linguists too have been interested in the musical layers of speech.
As early as 1877, Henry Sweet published his seminal “Handbook of Phonetics,” raising, perhaps for the first time within linguistics, the question of notating intonation contours, proposing his own simple system of symbols, for example “–” for level tone, “/” for rising, “\” for falling. Yet he begged off, writing: “The whole subject of intonation, especially, requires to be thoroughly investigated by a thoroughly competent observer, which I am very far from being” (Sweet, H. 1877: x). A series of linguists have piled on to the task, proposing various systems of notation to describe melody in speech: Harold Palmer (1924); Kenneth Pike (1945); Dwight Bolinger (1972; 1986); Alan Cruttenden (1997). Researchers in ethnomusicology, recognizing the intertwining of music and language in culture, have sought tributaries connecting these fields: George List (1961; 1963), William Bright (1963), and Bruno Nettl (1958) have exemplified this approach.
Ilse Lehiste’s work in the 1960s and 70s challenged linguists to attend more carefully to the details of spoken language, which she called suprasegmental (1970). Her more recent collaborations with the musicologist Jaan Ross (2001), exploring the temporal aspects of traditional Estonian song, further cuts across the boundaries of music and language, adding time as a layer to consider. The trend in linguistics from melody to rhythm and finally to their reconciliation as part of every day language has found its proponents: Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen (1993); Peter Auer, et al. (1999); Ann Wennerstrom (2001). The difficulty that yet remains is the need to bridge the chasm between these two fields, to finally provide musicologists and linguists a common language.
Justification
Developing a common set of terms and methods for classifying and interpreting sounds, regardless of their musical or linguistic character, is essential for any future ability to meaningfully discuss commonalities and differences between them. Many systems already exist, each with their own strengths and pitfalls. Examining the techniques that have emerged, understanding what they capture, and what they leave off, will enable research at the border between these disciplines, and facilitate discussion among practitioners with diverse backgrounds and training.
Qualifications
I received my PhD in Music, with a focus on the interactions between music and language. My dissertation addressed transcriptions by the composer Leoš Janáček, who spent more than three decades notating the melodies and rhythms of everyday speech, the sound of waves, the crowing of roosters, the buzzing of bees, all in musical notes. Since receiving the PhD, I have served as a Visiting Scholar in Linguistics, continuing my explorations of notational practice, speech prosody and first language acquisition, in their relationship to music. This background has uniquely prepared me to the task at hand. I seek NEH support to enable me the time and resources to dedicate myself to surveying and reviewing the ample literature on transcription and notation, to systematize their disparate approaches, clarify the methods and assumptions of each, providing linguists and musicologists the means for comparing materials at the border between these disciplines.
Results
The immediate product of this fellowship will be a series of articles regarding transcription systems in music and language research, to be submitted to the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Language (the instrument of the Linguistic Society of America) and Ethnomusicology (journal of the Society for Ethnomusicology), each specifically geared to the readership of those journals. As illustrations for those articles, I will produce comparative transcriptions from the following materials: spoken language recordings (in part from English language recordings I will prepare, and from Czech language materials I obtained from Dr. Marie Krčmová of Masaryk University, during my Fulbright year abroad); commercially available recordings of songs (for instance, I am in the process of examining a group of performances of “Hello Dolly,” comparing and contrasting the choices of different performers); and, various field recordings of speech and singing by the same individuals. In addition, I intend to present these materials and findings at musicology, ethnomusicology, and linguistic conferences; further, to develop them into coursework for undergraduate and graduate classes.
Bibliography
Auer, P., et al. Language in time : the rhythm and tempo of spoken interaction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Belin, P., et al. “Voice-selective areas in human auditory cortex,” Nature 403 (20 January 2000): 309-312.
Bolinger, D., ed. Intonation: Selected Readings. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1972.
Bolinger, D. Intonation and its parts : melody in spoken English. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986.
Bright, W. “Language and Music: Areas for Cooperation,” Ethnomusicology 7, no. 11 (1963): 26-32.
Couper-Kuhlen, E. English speech rhythm: form and function in everyday verbal interaction. Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1993.
Cruttenden, A. Intonation, 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Darwin, C. The Descent of Man. London: Penguin, 2004 [1879].
Gardiner, D. Intonation and Music: The Semantics of Czech Prosody. Bloomington, Indiana: Physsardt Publications, 1980.
Kassler, J. “Representing Speech through Musical Notation,” Journal of Musicological Research, 24, nos. 3-4 (2005).
Lehiste, I. Suprasegmentals. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1970.
List, G. “The boundaries of speech and song,” Ethnomusicology 7, no. 1 (1963).
Nettl, B. “Some linguistic approaches to musical analysis,” International Folk Music Journal 10: 37-41 (1958).
Palmer, H. English Intonation with Systematic Exercises. Cambridge: W. Heffer & Sons, 1924.
Pearl, J., The Music of Language: the Notebooks of Leoš Janáček. PhD diss., University of California-Santa Barbara, 2005.
Pearl, J., “Eavesdropping with a Master: Leoš Janáček and the Music of Speech,” Empirical Musicology Review (in press).
Pike, K. The Intonation of American English. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1963 [1945].
Pinker, S. How the Mind Works. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1997.
Ross, J. & I. Lehiste. The Temporal Structure of Estonian Runic Songs. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2001.
Sweet, H. A Handbook of Phonetics. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1877.
de Waal, F. The Ape and the Sushi Master. New York: Basic Books, 2001.
Wennerstrom, A. The Music of Everyday Speech: Prosody and Discourse Analysis. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
