Musical evolution ping...
Heard (or read) an interview once with Hunter Thompson.
He claimed he sometimes typed out one of Lincoln’s speeches
“to get the rhythm” before commencing his own work.
I had no problem with the claim.
Not sure how pertinent this is to the article.
I would agree that to a mind oblivious to the meaning of uttered sound, it may very well be indistinguishable from melody.
I would add that, to the degree written language is subvocalized, if divorced from its semantic content,
it too becomes simply another form of music.
My husband is recovering from a stroke that damaged the part of his brain relating to speech. He cannot form any words that I can recognize except OK and an occasional Yes. BUT he can sing Happy Birthday and other familiar songs. His speech therapist said that area of the brain is in a different location (for music) and was not affected by his stroke. That seems to run counter to this article as well.
I have had experience in teaching music to young children. I agree that to a baby, speech is music. They are fascinated with the tone, inflection, and how the sound is produced. Babies will look intently at a person’s eyes and mouth when they are being spoken to even when they haven’t a clue what is being said.
They love being read to even when only a few months old. Story telling with exaggerated vocal inflections is music to them.
Speech is tone and rhythm in a usually narrow range of pitch and with short tones, rather than long ones.
On the other hand, think of people who stutter or have other problems in speaking, who can sing (or otherwise vocally perform) without difficulty. Mel Tillis is one example; I knew a radio announcer who I would classify the same.
Yes. Poets have known this for ages. The great epics poets invoke the muse. Leave it to Socrates to be persuasive without it. He disliked the sophistic emphasis of sound over sense.
At least we know their intentions: “More research could also shed light on rehabilitation for people”
You know those nigh-omnipresent Pimsleur ads? Well, a few weeks ago I clicked on one. The lady in the video said that they had a method of teaching language that unlocked the language-learning software in the human brain and that after thirty minutes a day for ten days I'd be well on the way to learning another language--not fluent, but on my way. Plus it cost less than ten dollars, the shipping was free, and it came with a money back guarantee. What wasn't to like? So I bought it.
First off, I didn't get ten days' worth of lessons, but only eight. Second, there was some damage to a couple of the CD's causing difficulty in playing them (pops, skips, periods of silence, etc.). Not really enough to complain about, but you'd think Pimsleur would be able to send undamaged CD's to their customers.
Third, without being told until my CD's came in, I had unwittingly joined some sort of "book of the month club" type deal where I'll be receiving more lessons every month, though I have the right to use them for thirty days and send them back without paying. Not a bad deal, but I probably wouldn't have bought them in the first place if I'd known.
And fourthly, the simple fact is that all the information on the four CD's, as useful as it is, is barely a drop in the ocean to learning the language. They point out that the actual vocabulary necessary to get by in day to day situations is actually rather small, but this was still very little. I'd say it was only worth what I paid for it.
All my life I've been fascinated by languages and have tried to learn a second one, with absolutely no success except in one case: Biblical Hebrew (a textual language comprehended visually, not a spoken language comprehended aurally). Even my attempts to learn Modern Hebrew have been failures.
Naturally the language I sent for was Modern Hebrew, and it actually does seem to be a good way to process the language. The only problem is the small amount of information on only four CD's.
My problem in language learning is that I don't comprehend them very well aurally. If I look at a pointed Hebrew text (and Modern Hebrew is unpointed, so I can't read it either) I can figure out what part of speech it is even if I'm unfamiliar with the word. But spoken language flies past my ear so fast that I don't know what I've just heard. I just stand there gaping while my interlocutor waits for some sort of response.
I also seem to have trouble automatically knowing when to use masculine and feminine adjectives and forms of verbs. Intellectually I know all about this, but when I'm trying to respond immediately I'm liable to use the wrong gender.
Anyone else have any language learning woes they care to share? Misery (and failure) loves company.
Red herring. Basically everything overlaps neurally to some extent especially if it starts in the same audio pathway. Their claim that some low level processing is the same is practically a truism. But I doubt much of the congnitive processes are the same. For one thing their view of natural language is completely bottom up (like music). But it's demonstrably not, since garbled language can easily be understood by the context using top-down processing.
Interesting. Good to hear about some worthwhile research. I’m thinking it explains, at least in part, why I, a musically inclined cat, like some prose writers and dislike others for reasons not always of content but style. It must be the music of it. By the way, I like long flowing sentences, so-called run-on sentences, which I often write m’self.
And God sang, Let there be ....
It has a nice ring to it.