Language models and world music analysis

Music has a unique relationship to language. These are the only abilities used by humans to communicate with each other, in which sounds (and secondarily visual information, i.e., notation or scripts) are organized into sequences that are structured and meaningful. Moreover, like language, music varies in the way these sound sequences are organized in different cultures across the world, leading to the great diversity of both languages and musical idioms seen globally. Yet this diversity also masks deep connections in the structure of these sequences across the world’s musics and its languages. It is no surprise, then, that scholars of world music have often been inspired by ideas and models adapted from language scholarship. This chapter reviews two, complementary, language models that have been used in world music analysis, both influenced by proposals from linguistic theory. The first is what might be called an externalist model of world music analysis. This model focuses on the external functions of music in the world, for example, in socio-cultural communication, rather than its internal structure —akin to how language is used in the world as well. In contrast, the second model of world music analysis discussed in the chapter is an internalist one, which focuses on the internal—and specifically syntactic—structure of musical idioms across the world. This approach is influenced by generative proposals about the world’s languages, and therefore describes the internal structure of music in terms of the hierarchical relationships between the levels of a musical phrase. Unlike the externalist perspective, which confirms the difference of music and language, in how they are used in the world, the internalist perspective argues for their similarity, owing to their foundation in aspects of human psychology and biology, shared by people globally. The chapter ends, therefore, with some thoughts about how a specifically internalist perspective not only reveals some profound connections between the world’s musical cultures, but also between music and language, as universal attributes of human nature

Linguistics · Computer Science · Diverse Musicological Studies · History · Philosophy

• On African Music

  Kofi Agawu•On African Music•2023

  Add to list