"Music is a universal language. Or so musicians like to claim. “With music,” they’ll say, “you can communicate across cultural and linguistic boundaries in ways that you can’t with ordinary languages like English or French.”
On one level, this statement is obviously true. You don’t have to speak French to enjoy a composition by Debussy. But is music really a universal language? That depends on what you mean by “universal” and what you mean by “language.”
Every human culture has music, just as each has language. So it’s true that music is a universal feature of the human experience. At the same time, both music and linguistic systems vary widely from culture to culture.
Nevertheless, studies show that people are pretty good at detecting the emotions conveyed in unfamiliar music idioms—that is, at least the two basic emotions of happiness and sadness. Specific features of melody contribute to the expression of emotion in music. Higher pitch, more fluctuations in pitch and rhythm, and faster tempo convey happiness, while the opposite conveys sadness.
Perhaps then we have an innate musical sense. But language also has melody—which linguists call prosody. Exactly these same features—pitch, rhythm, and tempo—are used to convey emotion in speech, in a way that appears to be universal across languages.
Listen in on a conversation in French or Japanese or some other language you don’t speak. You won’t understand the content, but you will understand the shifting emotional states of the speakers. She’s upset, and he’s getting defensive. Now she’s really angry, and he’s backing off. He pleads with her, but she doesn’t buy it. He starts sweet-talking her, and she resists at first but slowly gives in. Now they’re apologizing and making up . . .
We can understand this exchange in a foreign language because we know what it sounds like in our own language. Likewise, when we listen to a piece of music, either from our culture or from another, we infer emotion on the basis of melodic cues that mimic universal prosodic cues. In this sense, music truly is a universal system for communicating emotion.
But is music a kind of language? Again, we have to define our terms. In everyday life, we often use “language” to mean “communication system.” Biologists talk about the “language of bees,” which is a way to tell hive mates about the location of a new source of nectar.
Florists talk about the “language of flowers,” through which their customers can express their relationship intentions. “Red roses mean…. Pink carnations mean… Yellow daffodils mean…” (I’m not a florist, so I don’t speak flower.)
And then there’s “body language.” By this we mean the postures, gestures, movements and facial expressions we use to convey emotions, social status, and so on. Although we often use body language when we speak, linguists don’t consider it a true form of language. Instead, it’s a communication system, just as are the so-called languages of bees and flowers.
By definition, language is a communication system consisting of (1) a set of meaningful symbols (words) and (2) a set of rules for combining those symbols (syntax) into larger meaningful units (sentences). While many species have communication systems, none of these count as a language because they lack one or the other component.
I think music is certainly not like a language. There is this thing going around the Internet has become more and more famous lately that music is like language. Okay, first of all, that's an incorrect quote, the original quote was, music is the universal language, which is unabashedly false. Because it's not a universal language.
Music is actually completely new as different associations depending on cultures, in several different cultures on on Earth, the minor scale is not sad. It's actually used to celebrate. Weddings are expensive wedding music. It's a minor thing about the klezmer music in Jewish culture or several Middle Eastern culture, they use the minor scale to indicate happiness. And that's the thing, it's also kind of losing a little bit this kind of association of being sad, even in western music, because of the influence of those other cultures.
Because originally in western music, minor scale, it's sadness period. Okay, so now we can determine that music is not a universal language, because we associate different things different cultures was at different intervals. So different musical gesture with different feelings. It's very hard to tell how much of these is nature.
And how much of this is nurture. Okay, how much of this is the natural response of the brain? How much of these is the cultural conditioning? Very, very hard. And I will let that musicologist speak about that. But first of all, music is not a universal language. Second, is it actually a language? Well, debatable, because you see, the problem is not so much saying Music is a language.
The problem is music as a language doesn't convey information. In the same way as "actual" languages. It music is a signal, there is some communication going through and clearly evokes emotion, but it cannot evoke specific, precise situation, like any language out there can. Okay, if anything, it is exactly the opposite.
What do I mean with that? I think a more correct statement would be that language is a kind of music, music probably came before language, okay, we were able to communicate using tones, the tone of voice well, before we invented words, and language and grammar and all these kinds of things. So it seems to be kinda kind of the consensus in the linguistic community, as far as I know, and I'm willing to stand corrected if I'm wrong, but that music evolves before languages, and language could be seen as an offshoot of music."
Based on a article by: David Ludden Ph.D. | Psychology Today 2015
