We discussed briefly in class the idea of music as a language that people can understand and appreciate better as they achieve higher degrees of fluency. I am inclined to agree that this is true. People with very little musical knowledge have still grown up exposed to music and therefore have some level of musical understanding even if they cannot explain it. I wonder if music is actually one language or if it a system of languages. Different uses of scale are used in different areas and so people have different systems of recognition based on these differences. As was said in class, a song using the scale common to India might sound happy to us while sad to another person. This seems to me equivalent to a foreign language. We might be able to make some sense of certain aspects, the way some words sound similar enough to be recognized in a foreign language, but the differences will strike us as confusing. This makes music into the heading under which a bunch of categories fall. Music in the U.S. represents one language, that in India another. I tried researching this idea on the web to see if I could find any authors that agreed or disagreed and I found a text by Friederike Flottmann that said “musical information is, to a large extent, processed in the brain areas also involved in, and previously believed to be exclusive networks for, language processing in the human brain” (19). This text aims to analyze whether training in music can help a person to learn a foreign language. They develop their hypothesis in part because of the similar aspects of the brain used in both language and music. Their similar positions in the brain seem to hint at some similarities in the way the brain processes both. Languages that use different intonations and tones from English can be hard to learn and almost impossible to sound natural when using. They do find that teaching music training in addition to teaching the language increases the ability to distinguish sounds in the foreign language. In the study German students were taught Finnish with the control groups only learning the language and the experimental group learning the language plus music training.
This text is available on google books:
How similar are music and language and do you think learning one would help in understanding the other?
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