A constraint-based approach to structuring language and music: Towards a roadmap for comparing language and music cross-culturally
Dicky Gilbers, Teja Rebernik · 2022
We pursue the hypothesis that musical differences between cultures are based on linguistic, especially phonological, properties of the culture’s spoken language. To study this hypothesis, we present a general constraint-based framework for describing the structural similarities between music and language. Music and language are structured by the fact that some sounds are more important than others, based on cognitive strategies which we present here as universal well-formedness conditions. However, which sounds are considered to be most salient differs across cultures, as evidenced by the world’s many linguistic and musical typologies. The first goal of our research approach is to identify these universal well-formedness conditions (e.g. prominence of strong elements based on the syllable/chord structure and domain marking based on intonation/ melody patterns, pauses) for speech and music. The second goal is to assess how cultures differ from each other in terms of the relative salience assigned to these conditions (i.e. how these conditions are “ranked”). The current paper is meant to be an introduction to a new approach with focus on the identification of general well-formedness conditions. We introduce similar conditions for the description of language and music in order to make comparison of the two disciplines more fruitful. The goal of our research approach is to create a theoretical and methodological map to aid more detailed culture-specific comparisons. The ultimate aim is to provide a comprehensive typological overview for which we will start with a selection of culture families following the World Atlas of Language Structures online (Dryer & Haspelmath, 2013) for language and the Global Jukebox (Wood & Arèvalo, 2018) for music.