Cha-Cha with Chomsky

My TESOL classes this semester form a pyramid of increasing concreteness. The first and most abstract, from the classroom perspective, is Linguistics for Teachers.  The professor is a wonky, handsome cross between Mister Rogers and Mr. Spock. He wears stylish cardigans and speaks with a soft, southern intelligence,
which tightens when he has lost control, has mismanaged class time, which he insists petulantly is "not mah fault." He brightens at the mention of isoglossic bundles, chuckles at the notion of indistinct signals, bristles at the suggestion that a noun might be "a person, place or thing," nearly shouts at the very idea that a linguistic rule can possibly be enforced or broken. He doesn't get, is downright bewildered by, the everyday emotions his students exhibit -- giggles about some gaffe, tears after a difficult day. He is at once buttery and frosty, iced with irascible molasses.

So there is always some level of theater, but the material is tough, really tough.  For homework we mine deep research choked with technical terminology for some hard-won nugget of interesting gist.  We are quizzed on our heroic blood diamonds before class discussion, after which we are enlightened but often disheartened.  But it is beginning to crystalize now, at least for me.  I can describe the way languages borrow, flow, change, even die over time, distance, individuals and situations; explain confidently the difference between formalists such as Chomsky and functionalists, like Diver.  I can analyze why the study of linguistics was, for many decades, an unscientific, metaphysical muddle; how the communicative theory requires distinctness of signals;  why the phoneme, a minimally distinct unit of sound and the traditional starting place for understanding linguistic signals, doesn't work and isn't necessary as a starting point.  Most importantly, I am able to expound on how crucial are the "human factors" of economy and negotiated, inferential context -- when the signals, as is so often the case, are just not clear and distinct enough.

And then, like a Nuyorican poetry slam in the midst of an Episcopal homily, our final, curve-ball project is about--hold on for it now--MUSIC. Bluegrass music, no less.  We attend, as a class, a performance of Bob Green's Mountain Music Group, and are to write a paper comparing some aspect of language to said music. Perhaps discuss -- though application has been essentially verboten all semester -- how it might all pertain to teaching, of language and the arts.  I raise eyebrows and objections, fume and steam, wring my hands, warm up, listen, tap and air-twang along, research and percolate. And I write a paper I actually enjoy and appreciate.

I'm still reeling just a bit from it all, but feeling as if it might just add up to something, somehow.  It's like Diane Larsen-Freeman's Compexity/Chaos Theory of Language Acquisition:  the learning process is messy, can't be reduced to its component parts or really taught in a linear way if at all, and we create our own system and order as we go along.  Speakers of any language are like dance partners, she says, getting used to each other's style, going with the flow even when there's been a misstep, knowing there's no right or wrong answer or steps or grammar -- just dancers in a rhythmic pas de deux.

So it's just you and me, and Mr. Rogers-Spock now.  I've included my paper, below.  Come dance with me for a bit.

Meaning in Music Versus Language 

By Joan Lesko Giardina

There is no question that human language has meaning.  While the meaning may be influenced by context and negotiated between speaker and listener, our utterances communicate semantically and sometimes very specifically.  Linguists such as Bill Van Patten have outlined the types of meaning that language can convey (Van Patten 2-3).  There is concrete referential meaning (“[kaet] means a four legged feline”); displaced semantic referential meaning (“-aba- in Spanish means non-punctual, the [ongoing past] ”;) sociolinguistic meaning (“vous is used instead of tu to indicate politeness”); pragmatic meaning, influenced by context (“It’s cold” might be read by my husband as a request to close the window) and non-referential meaning (“He’s in jail” has a different meaning than “He’s in a jail”, though the speaker may refer to the same institution in both utterances.). Even formalists such as Noam Chomsky, who posited that language has an underlying form distinct from meaning, and went so far as to suggest that semantics be excluded from the field of linguistics, still acknowledged that there is a “semantic phenomenon” (Chomsky, 139). 

To what extent can music be said to have meaning?  During a performance of Bob Green and Company’s “Mountain Music,” the plaintive but high-speed twang of Tony Trischka’s banjo during a performance of “I Wonder Where You Are Tonight” might remind one of the hardscrabble lives of Appalachian miners and their effort to both express and distract themselves from their woes.   It might create in any listener a sorrowful and/or uplifting mood.  How does that, or any other aspects of music’s communicative ability, compare to the semantic properties of language?

In his article “Music and Language,” Chris Dobrian, from the University of California, surveys various musical thinkers’ stances on the question (Dobrian 1992).  Igor Stravinsky asserted that music is powerless to express anything, including a feeling or mood.  It is an illusion based on an achieved order, he said, that produces in the listener a reaction unique to music but distinct from any real-life reference (Stravinsky, 91-82.) Composer Aaron Copland felt that, although music does create mood, and may even express “a state of meaning for which there exists no adequate word in any language…many musicians had concluded that all music has only a purely musical meaning.” His own conclusion was that music does have meaning, that we can think in terms of what a piece is “saying” or “about,” but that it is not possible to explain in words what that meaning is.  (Copland 73-74).  Musicologist Dereck Cook claimed a more referential meaning for music when he said,  “Music is, in fact, 'extra-musical' in the sense that poetry is 'extra-verbal', since notes, like words, have emotional connotations....Music functions as a language of the emotions.”  (Cooke, 15, 32, 33)  Paul Hindemith, however, said that even the “pseudo feeling” expressed in music was completely and justifiably subjective, and that listeners often have quite disparate reactions to the same piece (Hindemith, 40), though Cooke explained this phenomenon by saying that some listeners are just incapable of understanding music properly (Cooke, 21-22).

Erin McMullen and Jenny Safran, in “Music and Language: A Developmental Comparison,” assert that of the many areas for comparison between language and music, meaning has the weakest parallel (McMullen & Safran, 298).  Surely, they say, music does not carry the referential meaning of language, and they limit any overlap to “emotional meaning” expressed by such “paralinguistic” aspects of language as intonation.  Although they concede that in general, emotional responses to music may vary by culture, and are likely learned associations and responses, this does not differ from nor negate any similarities to language.  Indeed, it is when they quote the research on the biological and universal aspects of emotional reaction to music that they undercut any comparison to the arbitrary aspects of spoken language’s form-meaning connection and communication:

"Several studies have found that infants as young as 2 months old, like adults, prefer consonance to dissonance. This preference has long been posited as an important underpinning of emotion in music In addition, research has demonstrated infant preferences for higher-pitched music, which often correlates with positive emotional judgments. Furthermore, as with lullabies, some emotional content in music is recognizable cross-culturally, indicating a possible set of musical universals of emotion." (McMullen & Safran, 298-299)

McMullen and Safran cite research on infants’ preference for high-pitched language utterances as indicating a “paralinguistic” parallel between music and language, while again stating that “many complex adult responses to music would appear to require enculturation.”  They conclude that the semantic similarities between language and music might best be seen in poetry, which makes use of basic prosodic cues but requires cultural and syntactic knowledge for full appreciation.  There is some research “comparing music and poetry as abstract cognitive domains,” they note, but none that contrasts “the ways in which they access emotion or the ways in which these emotional cues become available to developing children” that would put the emotional communicativeness of music on the same plane as language. (McMullen & Safran, 300).

The general consensus I was gathering, that if music has any meaning it is emotional and not referential, seemed intuitively correct and obvious until I came across a number of surprising articles about a recent study that suggests otherwise.  In a 2007 article from the online journal “Cognitive Daily”, columnist David Munger reports on this research, which used “semantic priming” to study whether music conveys semantic meaning in the same manner as words.  He sums up the method and premise, employed by a neuroscientific research team led by Stefan Koelsch, thus:

"Priming occurs when we are exposed to a word. Continuing with the "bee" example, if we read the word "bee," and then are asked to perform some sort of task on a related word or concept, we work faster and more accurately. We might, for example, be faster at unscrambling the letters VEIH to form the word "hive." We have been primed to think about bees, and so we're better at dealing with bee-related concepts, from honey to stings. But what if we heard Flight of the Bumblebee for the first time, without being told what the song was about? Would we still be better at handling bee-related language? In other words, does bee music prime as effectively as the word bee?"  (Munger, 2007)

Prior research has shown that patterns in brain activity, as measured by EEG mapping known as N400, differ greatly in experiments associated with semantic priming for words.  Researchers in this study chose to use the N400 measure to see if such a distinction could be seen with semantic priming in music.  Subjects were played a range of musical recordings that might be associated with a word in a variety of ways.  One recording might actually resemble the sound of a “bird,” but others had more abstract connotations, such as a piece that a number of listeners felt consistently conveyed a sense of “wide”-ness.  Munger goes on to explain:

In their first experiment, listeners heard a musical excerpt or a sentence (a prime), then were presented with a word on-screen that was either related or unrelated to the prime. They then indicated whether the prime and the word were related, while brain activity was measured with an EEG  (Munger 2007).

The researchers charted, among others associations, the EEG N400 results for four different primes, and each paired with the word “wide.” The results indicated that  “when a word has been primed by related language, the N400 is significantly more negative than when the prime is unrelated….there is a similar pattern for related versus unrelated musical primes.” (Emphasis mine.)

Munger summarizes the study’s findings, and his own conclusions, when he reports:

"Koelsch et al. conclude that for these examples, at least, music conveys semantic meaning in the same manner as words. While in some cases listeners weren't as accurate at determining when musical primes were related to the target words (compared to linguistic primes), when the meaning was correctly established, it had the same priming effect as language.

Music, it appears, can convey much more meaning than we thought it did." (Munger 2007)

So it seems that music, like language, has some biological, but more often learned associations that can convey emotional significance, and possibly more specially referential meaning.   Teaching artist Jessica’s Meyer’s session with our class, introducing us to bluegrass music, provides a useful model for exposing children to the many meanings of music.  She provided samples of the genre, encouraged our own “noticings,” posted visual associations, which were then linked sociologically and historically to the musical form.  She invited us, using the paradigms we had observed and discussed, to participate in composing and performing our own interpretations.  This multifaceted approach enabled the class to tune into some of the intrinsic sounds and impact of bluegrass (e.g. Its very rapid tempo but slightly whiny twang seem contradictory, mutli-layered), and to learn other associations that might otherwise have escaped us (Appalachian miners created music to express their trials and distract themselves from them).   This balanced inquiry approach, including attention, composing and performing, helped us internalize and automacize what we were learning.  Teachers would do well to do emulate this approach to arts education, and in many ways language education, in their classrooms.

 References

Chomsky, N. Language and Responsibility, Pantheon 1977

Cooke, Deryck. The Language of Music. New York: Oxford University Press, 1959

Copland, Aaron. What to Listen for in Music. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1957

Dobrian, C. , 1992. Music and Language,http://music.arts.uci.edu/dobrian/CD.music.lang.htm, Department of Music, University of California at Irvine

Hindemith, Paul. A Composer's World, Horizons and Limitations. Gloucester, MA.: Peter Smith, 1969

McMullen, E.  & J. R. Saffran. Music and Language: A Developmental Comparison, Music Perception

Spring 2004, Vol. 21, No. 3, 289–311

Munger, David. Can music convey meaning in the same way as language? Cognitive Daily, Feb. 2007,http://scienceblogs.com/cognitivedaily/2007/02/can_music_convey_meaning_in_th.php

Stravinsky, Igor. 1936, Chronicle of My Life. London: Victor Gollancz, 1936.

Van Patten, B. , J. Williams, S. Rott, M. Overstreet (2004), Form-Meaning Connections is Second Language Acquisition, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates