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Bonus 41: Tones, drums, and whistles - linguistics and music
🕑 Added 2020-07-02 23:49:39 +0000 UTCBoth speech and music can involve making sounds using the human body, but they also have differences -- for example, music is generally more aesthetically stylized and can involve way more additional instruments than language. Different cultures highlight the similarities and differences between music and language in various ways, which we've received lots of questions about!
In this bonus episode, Lauren and Gretchen get enthusiastic about the relationship of language and music, including how languages with tone deal differently with matching up those tones to musical pitches, mapping drums and whistles onto language sounds in order to communicate across long distances, using linguistics to analyze genres of music like opera and beatboxing, and that time Gretchen went on holiday and actually ended up getting a demonstration of the whistled language Silbo Gomero.
Announcements:
In case you missed it, we are delighted to announce the winners of the 2020 LingComm Grants. Here are the project titles for the 4 grantees, and there’s more information about each project on the LingComm website, as well as two honourable mentions. We’re very excited to share more with you as they develop.
- The Black Language Podcast (Anansa Benbow)
- Nonbinary Linguistics youtube channel (Nina Lorence-Ganong)
- Jazicharnica (Јазичарница) blog (Nina Tunteva and Viktorija Blazheska)
- War of Words podcast (Juana de los Santos; Angela Makeviciuz; Antonella Moschetti; Néstor Bermúdez)
We had over 75 applications from around the world and we’d like to thank all applicants for making the job of deciding extremely difficult!
New masks
By popular demand, our IPA, Tree and Esoteric Symbol designs are now available on these new non-medical reusable fabric masks from Redbubble. On our store you’ll find the white IPA characters on black, red or navy, and the esoteric symbols in white on black or green on black. If you fancy another colour, or the tree design, we’ve made masks available on all of the scarf pages.
Also check out our Schwa (Never Stressed) pins, IPA scarves, IPA socks, and more at RedBubble.
Here are the links mentioned in this episode:
- Some correlation between lexical tone language and musical pitch aptitude
- Some more correlation between lexical tone language and musical pitch aptitude
- Superlinguo post on tone/intonation in Syuba
- Talking drums
- Talking drums in action
- Superlinguo post on mumbling 'I don't know'
- Whistled languages
- Why are opera singers/high notes hard to understand?
- Study of Voice Quality in High-Pitched Heavy Metal Singing
- Trudgill on the Beatles
- Beatboxing in an MRI
You can listen to this episode on this page, via the Patreon RSS or download the mp3. A transcript of this episode is available as a Google Doc. Lingthusiasm is also on Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com or chat to us on the Patreon page. Gretchen is on Twitter as @GretchenAMcC and blogs at AllThingsLinguistic. Lauren is on Twitter as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.
Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our editorial producer is Sarah Dopierala, and our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.
Comments
I feel compelled to also mention my dream of becoming an opera diction coach because of how the job, just like this episode which reminds me of it, so beautifully synthesizes these two wonderful things about our world.
As an opera singer and a native speaker of Mandarin, I so thoroughly enjoyed this episode! And in my very first linguistics course, we learned about talking drums as well! Thank you so much for exploring this topic - it was a great throwback to some of the things which got me into linguistics in the first place :')
