Music and Language

Language and music are the most impressive examples of humans' capacity to process complex sound and structure. Though interest in the relationship between these two abilities has a long history, only recently has cognitive and neuroscientific research started to illuminate both what is shared and what is distinct between linguistic and musical processing. This review considers evidence for a link between language and music at three levels of analysis, sound, structure, and meaning. These links not only inform our understanding of language and music, but also add to a more basic understanding of our processing of complex auditory stimuli, structure, meaning, and emotion. Music and language in human culture has a lot in common, they both use complex sequences and similar grammar to communicate. Scholars and scientists have studied and proved these similarities in their books music and language have basic obvious similarities. They both have rhythm, melody and syntax, and they both convey emotions using sounds. Both music and language have a lot of similarities, they involve complex sequences that unfold in time. They are both forms of communication. This has interested all the world's best philosophers from Plato going back over 2 ,000 years. Scientists like Darwin wrote about possible evolutionary links between music and language in his book The Descent of Man and so did artists like Leonard Bernstein who gave a series of lectures at Harvard in the 70s. He spoke about the grammar of language and the grammar of music from Noam Chomsky's theories. So it's a persistent question. It keeps drawing interest from scientists today but there are some basic obvious similarities. For examples, both music and language have rhythmic systematic patterns of timing accent and grouping. Both language and music have melody structured patterns of pitch, 29 over time. Both have syntax. Discrete elements like words or notes and principles for combining those elements into sequences. Sentences are just random sequences of words. Both convey effect which means emotion using sound. You can make out a lot of emotion from a person's voice and music has the characteristic of providing emotions like happiness or sadness. The similarities between music and language keep drawing interests from world's best philosophers, scientists and artists to study since Plato until nowadays. This topic is described as the similarities between music and language. Some obvious similarities include having rhythmic systematic patterns and melody structured patterns of pitch, having syntax, combining discrete elements into sequences and conveying emotional information.