On the relationships between Music and Language

Authors

  • José Manuel Igoa Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (UAM)

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.21932/epistemus.1.2703.0

Keywords:

música, lenguaje, psicología, lingüística

Abstract

This article outlines a reflection about the parallelisms and contrasts between music and language. That comparison circumscribes to western tonal music and the oral form of language. The article begins by offering a brief description of the aspects in which music and language are feasible to be compared, pointing out their social and cultural character, the esthetic experiences aroused by them, their sensitive-motor and physical base, the acoustic environment in which they develop and the neuro-cognitive faculties that support them. Secondly, we describe some parallelisms or similar properties relative to the origin and the development of the musical and linguistic competences of the individual (ontogenesis) and the species (philogenesis) and to the integrating components of the musical and linguistic faculties. This comparison reveals the existence of a group of shared parameters, such as accent, duration or tonal pitch in the area of sound; the ruled combination of sound units to form hierarchic structures in the area of structure and the expression of emotions and the power to evoke experiences in the area of meaning. However, there is also a description of some aspects of each domain that find no correlative in the other, such as harmony in music or compositionality of meaning in language. Furthermore, there is an exploration comparing the architecture of the cognitive processes that support the musical and linguistics faculties and of the resources of attention and memory that are consumed throughout those processes. In this domain, we revise some empirical data gathered from the study of the alterations in the musical abilities (amusia) and linguistic abilities (aphasia), of the investigation of the musical and linguistic processing by means of the registration of evoked brain potentials and brain neuro-images techniques and of the experiments with behavioral tasks of musical and linguistic perception and production. The article finishes with some observations about the minimum correspondences between language and music in terms of cognitive architecture and shared resources between both faculties in an intent to justify the relevance of the question about the relationships between music and language from a psychological perspective.

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Published

2010-12-17

How to Cite

Igoa, J. M. (2010). On the relationships between Music and Language. Epistemus. Journal of Studies in Music, Cognition & Culture, 1(1), 97–125. https://doi.org/10.21932/epistemus.1.2703.0

Issue

Section

Artículos originales de investigación