Is Music a Language

NING,GE 2015.

Is music a language?

Name

Institution

Language is a means of convey information about the external world from one person to another, then music doesn't seem to share the similarity of language. The listener can't find any data about the outside world solely from the music. However one can conclude certain information with knowledge of some of the history background behind the compose of a piece of music. language act as a means to share ideas in a way that many people can understand, and can evoke certain emotions or images with artistic and abstract sounds of the music and again, the listeners shared history and knowledge to appreciate the beauty of the music. The similarity shared by language and music is that they both provide stimulus which could be interpreted as data or information to our senses. Interpretation of the external information is a complex process, which could include recall understand,deduce and even create new information. Our physical sensory receptors-ear, play a primary role in the interpretation of speech or music and act as "transducers" to transmit the information to impulses that recognized by the brain.

Traditionally, music science and language have been treated as distinguished psychological disciplines, In fact, the first known attempt to establish the connection between them was delivered by the conductor Bernstein in music lectures at Harvard in 1970s, he mentioned the Chomsky linguistic revolution that has occurred only 20 years ago. Bernstein put Chomsky's generative grammar" analog music" grammar "structure. Although this is only a very rough assumptions, but he directly inspired the later studies on this science issue to some scientists and music. One of the famous studies is A generative theory of tonal music by Jackendoff from Tufts University and co-author anthropologist Lerdahl from Columbia...