Mar 25 2009
Cliché Supported by Science, Sort Of
Guess what? Language Of Music Really Is Universal, Study Finds
Well, at least if you define language so loosely that it technically isn’t language. Still, the finding was way cool, man. It really made me get my intellectual groove on.
Native African people who have never even listened to the radio before can nonetheless pick up on happy, sad, and fearful emotions in Western music, according to a new report published online on March 19th in Current Biology.
Allow me to speculate here, but it seems to me that by singing words and adding auxiliary sounds you can really stretch out and augment the tonal component to language — the layer expressing emotion. When covering the topic of emotion in my general psychology class I have often used an activity to illustrate the point. Students are challenged, in small groups, to see how many distinct emotions they can express, one emotion per attempt, with the groupmates guessing, when saying this short string of words: Your mother called. Most can successfully express a whole bunch: joy, sadness, surprise, anger, confusion, disgust.
Not to be a party-pooper here, however, but music itself isn’t a language. While it may be a non-symbolic means of communication, something akin to the exaggeration of voice inflections that accompany emotional expression, lacking the symbolic part, music is not language.
For example, the word “apple” is a symbol. It can mean many things. I can bite an apple, I can type on an Apple, and I write about the apple of my eye. But musical sounds, like the ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum, in the Jaws movie as the shark approaches, don’t have that flexibility. And that is perhaps why people of different cultures can identify music as happy, sad, or fearful.
