musical ear and language, related?

Whistle
1

I was reading somewhere recently (online, but I lost the page) that the ability to learn languages, and in particular how hard it is to get rid of your accent, is related to how good of a musical ear you have.

As an example, the page said native Russian speakers have trouble distinguishing the sounds of cook (making food) and kook (crazy person). People who play a musical instrument can distinguish between the sounds much better than those who don’t.

Anybody have opinions?

Personally, I’m dabbling in three languages trying to decide for sure which to take for college, and the other day somebody told me my pronunciation was ‘really good for a gringo’. In English I have a really heavy Southern accent but I also have a pretty good musical ear (at least I’d like to think so), and I think that’s why. The subtle difference between cook and kook is the same as between F and F#.

2

A friend of mine was telling me recently that French people have a hard time telling the difference between the words “beach” and “b**ch!” You can probably imagine the jokes we made about this one…

Justine

3

Resident Linguist here.

Yes, having a musical ear and having an ear for dialects do tend to run hand in hand. Moreover, according to linguist Ray Jackendoff (“A Generative Theory of Tonal Music”, “Semantics and Cognition” and “Consciousness and the Computational Mind”, “Semantic Structures” etc.), Language, Music, and visual perception are all organized largely in the same areas of the brain and music and visual perception share many characteristics with “language”.

There ya’ go.

4

Hey, Tommy, what do you teach?
Ray J is chair of linguistics and cog sci at
Brandeis, I believe.

Cranberry, the language depends on what you like
to eat. Mex? Spanish. Schniztel? German, and so on.

Also what you want to study in the long term,
if you have such plans.
Greek would be swell if one wanted to
read the ancients, and Latin would
help you write beautiful English. Also
go to med school.

If you have long term plans, like grad school
in something, that might help you select.

If you plan to travel somewhere, that
might help you decide, too. Best, Jim

5

Serious? Please explain that more.
More important, explain how there are so many talented ‘backwoods’ folk musicians who can barely speak standard english.
“Open dat winda, It’s gettin hot in here”

6

You’re starting with an ethnocentric argument: that “standard English is better.” For “backwoods” musicians, using your term, they may well have little to no use for our perceived standardized form of American English. The Brits think we’re all “backwoods” for the most part. Different speech communities develop different dialects for many reasons (geography, concentrations of settlers from certain parts of the world, socio economic factors) and then generally maintain that “separateness” as a way of identifying with that speech group. “I’m a native here; I belong.” It’s quite possible that a particular “backwoodsian” knows her or his own tongue (with it’s specific rules of vocabulary, syntax, meaning, and pronunciation) much better than you or I know our tongue.

Check out the movie “Nell” again sometime. For all it’s corniness, it shows well that the linguistic “deficit” of the main character is only a perceived one; her language is quite developed. She merely learned it from a source which was not “standard American English”.

7

I’ve always thought that there was some connection. Also, someone who starts learning a new language before about the age of twelve will tend to have an easier time, and some of the best musicians I know personally started serious playing and/or singing before that age.

As an example, the page said native Russian speakers have trouble distinguishing the sounds of cook (making food) and kook (crazy person). People who play a musical instrument can distinguish between the sounds much better than those who don’t.

We all have sounds that are hard for us to distinguish that is quite obvious to a speaker who grew up with those sounds as part of their native language. I l was 20 when I started learning Mandarin, and didn’t have much problem with any of the sounds, but Taiwanese Hokkien has a couple of distinctions that still give me a headache.

The subtle difference between cook and kook is the same as between F and F#.

How about the subtle difference between initial unaspirated p and b? I’ve always had trouble with Arabic `ayn before i vs. 'alif before ai, too.

I can play guitar fairly well, but can hardly tune one without an electronic tuner. I can tell when two notes are slightly different, but don’t have any sense of which one is higher until they get quite far apart. In collge Intro to Psychology, my class was given something called “The Seashore Musical Aptitude Test”. It was simply a set of about 100 tone pairs, and we just picked which of each pair was the higher. Out of a class of 50 students, I got the lowest score. This makes fiddle too much of a challenge to be worth the pain I would cause to others.

So, there’s more to musical ability than acuity of hearing.

8

Quote @ Darwin

How about the subtle difference between initial unaspirated p and b? I’ve always had trouble with Arabic `ayn before i vs. 'alif before ai, too.

When I first started studying Spanish on my own a few years ago, I could not for the life of me remember that v is pronounced exactly the same as b.

But the other day I was saying words and phrases in Spanish over and over, just because I like to do that, and afterwards, in the middle of a conversation when I needed some vinegar, I asked for “been ay har” and didn’t even realise it.

Quote @ Darwin

I can play guitar fairly well, but can hardly tune one without an electronic tuner. I can tell when two notes are slightly different, but don’t have any sense of which one is higher until they get quite far apart.

I can tune stringed instruments without a tuner, but afterwards when I do put the tuner to it I find that I’ve started on something like a really flat C#, but the intervals are all pretty much on-the-spot. I can’t hear a note and just automatically know which note is is, as some people can.

9

Quote @ jim stone

Also what you want to study in the long term,
if you have such plans.
Greek would be swell if one wanted to
read the ancients, and Latin would
help you write beautiful English. Also
go to med school.

If you have long term plans, like grad school
in something, that might help you select.

Long term I would love to go to grad school but the only thing I have fully planned right now is this coming fall semester. And I only chose a major because I had to, I’m still completely unsure what I wanna do. That’s the Libra in me.

I wouldn’t want to study Latin or Greek. I don’t know why, but it’s the same way with German. They just don’t appeal to me. Two languages I’d love to study are Portuguese and Japanese but any of the schools I’ll be going to for at least the next 2 years offer neither. Schools after that do, but in the meantime I still want to study a language besides English. I’m enrolled in a French class because I couldnt get into a Spanish one (apparently the people who study Spanish these days outnumber French 3-1 so a lot of French classes are on the empty-ish side), but I plan to eventually.

10

Howdy,

Y’all might want to check out the “Ennis Singing” thread over on the uilleann piping board.

Seumas Ennis, though I believe he was a native speaker of English, was renowned for his amazing ablilty at picking up dialects of Irish…in addition to being probably the finest uilleann piper of the 20th century. While on his collecting jaunts for the IFC, RTE, the BBC, the CIA and KFC, he would attempt to communicate with his contacts to the best of his ability in their native dialect. Thus, one week, he’d be chatting with fiddle players up in Donegal, the next week he’d be laughing it up with fiddle players down in Sliabh Luachra and then after that off to sit down with some sean-nos singers in Conamara. Perhaps most impressive was that in addition to his mastery of all extant Irish dialects, he could get along just dandy in Scottish Gaelic as well (it is another language…very close to Irish in most respects, but distinctly different). While collecting for the BBC on Barra, many of the natives mistook him for a Scotsman from Skye or the mainland, his accent being only very slightly different from theirs. It was Seumas’ opinion that being able to communicate with local sources in their own dialect helped to break the ice and gain their trust.

One of my musical heroes, my college ethnomusicology professor Gernot Blume, could play well in excess of thirty instruments (he had studied with Keith Jarrett, Ali Akbar Khan, and Ravi Shankar to name a few). He was a native German speaker, but could also speak English, French and Yiddish with a pretty high degree of fluency.

I lived in Japan for about 2 1/2 years and during my time there, I was always amazed at some of the polyglots I encountered there…particularly the Dutch people I ran into. Most of them could speak about five foreign languages without difficulty (just what are they smokin’ over there…and where can I get some?!).

My primary foreign language is Japanese (spoken with a defiantly “hickish” Mie Prefecture accent). I’ve also studied Scottish Gaelic off and on for about six or seven years (although I’m pretty rusty…not many Gaelic speakers around the States–or Japan–to practice with). I can fake my way through most common pleasantries in Irish as well (ex. “Dia dhuit a Shiobhain. An bhfuil tu posta?”) and occasionally make attempts to revive my mostly-forgotten high school French (consumption of alcohol seems to increase my powers of verb conjugation considerably). I tried to teach myself Greek with lofty ambitions of spending long winter evenings reading through Herodotus in the original, got about as far as reading the alphabet, and gave up.

I’d love to try and pick up a bit of Spanish. Or Korean. Or Mandarin…but I’m starting to think I may have already used up too much grey matter.

It may be too late for most of us on this board to take advantage of the language /music connection, but there is still hope for the future generation…

Step 1.) Procure yourselves an infant.

Step 2.) Get said infant enrolled in a Mandarin Chinese immersion program
pronto.

Step 3.) When your bilingual child’s hands are large enough, give 'em a whistle.

Step 4.) Sit back and watch your little prodigy develop (may require additional water and sunlight).

11

French is very nice.
When you go to grad school in philosophy
(where all this undergraduate education leads,
as all right thinking
people agree) you can read Descartes
in the original. Also when you go to
Paris you will fit right in, mon chere!

I hope you have a wonderful time in college.

12

Quote @ Fork

One of my musical heroes, my college ethnomusicology professor Gernot Blume, could play well in excess of thirty instruments (he had studied with Keith Jarrett, Ali Akbar Khan, and Ravi Shankar to name a few). He was a native German speaker, but could also speak English, French and Yiddish with a pretty high degree of fluency.

Just as playing one (or better, two) instruments makes picking up the third easier, learning a second language makes the next easier.

Think, if you can remember it, to when you couldn’t read music. Remember how confusing it looked? But once you learned to read the music, and understood the way the notes work in relation to each other, you could transfer that to other instruments. It’s the same way with how languages work, especially since most are related to one another (whistle would be English and a keyed piccolo’d be German).

13

How nice to have it spelled out and documented :smiley:

Didn’t I hear that someone has done a study showing that speakers of tonal languages have a higher percentage of the population with perfect pitch?

M

14

There certainly are proven correlations, but the conclusions are often shaky. The old research war between those who look for cultural differences vs. those after physical, or genetic, ones.
Just as well, it’s languages, through other research, which seem to favour musical training, not vice-versa.
It’s also been researched and demonstrated (probably just as shakily) that Russian speakers have a greater ease to learn most foreign languages, because the musical range of their language is greater and covers the scales of most Indo-European languages.
The research you point to may also neglect that many languages–take Vietnamese–are modal more than tonal. So this could make their music harder for us to understand, as their language, and vice-versa.
Then the question is, what type of language compared to what music?
As for the F-F#, I understand most cultures will distinguish easily a semitone (including Russians :roll: ) while “cook” and “kook” is more of a modal than pitch question.
Btw, build some sentences out of context, and no-one will hear if not expressly paying attention. Something like “the chef ordered a sauce from his kook”. This plays can be successfully attempted in most languages, including Russian (or Vietnamese).
PS: Btw, it just occurs to me that in appropriate context, a Russian will confuse a cook with a… cock : “kok” is legitimate Russian for a cook, especially in marine circles, as are “maître-coq” and “maître-queux” in French. Which hardly presumes of their ability to play a roll. Or cock up a spring-roll.

15

Portuguese is a beautiful language. I find it easier to read than Spanish. But it is harder to understand the spoken language. Portuguese is not phonetic like Spanish. There a lot of exceptions to pronunciation.

I personally feel that we should become more multilingual like they are in Europe. Here in the DC area you can hear just about any language you can think of. I heard a fellow in Walmart talking with a friend and I didn’t recognize the language. I asked about and he told me it was an African tribal language I had never heard of. Right now I am working on Korean.

BTW if you have difficulty with language and a poor musical ear don’t take up the morse code. It requires the same area of the brain. It took me about 5 times as long as other people to get my ham license because of the code requirements.

Ron

16

It seems to me that Portugese is one of those languages that millions and millions people speak but nobody studies. Portugese is more widely spoken but French is much more commonly taught in schools (at least here in the United States).

I personally feel that we should become more multilingual like they are in Europe.

Me, too. Within fifty years Spanish is supposed to be spoken by just as many people as English in this country.

BTW if you have difficulty with language and a poor musical ear don’t take up the morse code. It requires the same area of the brain. It took me about 5 times as long as other people to get my ham license because of the code requirements.

Ham license?

17

Short wave radio. I used to listen in, but
all they talked about were their radios. Best

18

Good point.
Its a wonder that the “resident linguist”
who seems to equate “dalect” with “language”
didn’t raise this.

Also there is an issue about rhythms in languages
and how they may inform the music.

19

I tend to doubt it. I have several in-laws who aren’t the least bit musical.

Likewise, people with a terrible sense of pitch can learn tone languages as second languages–though I have more trouble with Hokkien, which uses both contour and register, than with Mandarin or Vietnamese, which use only contour–and I don’t even want to talk about Cantonese.

However, each register has associated tenseness, which provides clues in addition to pitch. In fact, since the pitch is relative, it may be that tenseness is more important than raw pitch.

20

Do you count your in-laws as relatives
and do they make you tense??
:party: