The hidden music of writing: language is a song we sing, but can the written word convey the tune?

Back in the day of the tappity-tap-tap of the manual typewriter--punctuated by the ding! at the end of each line and the z-z-z-z-i-p! of the , carriage return--you could say writing had a certain music to it. Indeed, some composers actually wrote music based on or incorporating the sound of the typewriter in action. *

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

But the barely audible scrawl of a pen on paper or the light clacking of fingers on a keyboard generally doesn't evoke the same response. The act of writing is a seemingly silent experience--unless you work with your iPod plugged into your ears, in which case you may very well hear music while you write. But that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the music of writing.

The silence of writing is an illusion. The music is there--inside the writer's head--singing out in varying rhythms and tempos, faltering, halting, starting and stopping, flittering, flowing, and sometimes even soaring out through the fingers into words on a page. The music is in the language.

Language Is a Song We Sing

Let me tell you a story. One day, as I was walking into a restaurant in the bilingual city of Montreal, Canada. I said "Bonjour!" to the waiter who greeted me. No, I didn't merely say hello: I raised my voice an octave above normal to the range

French women often speak in and sang out "Bonjour!" in two distinct musical notes--a high note followed by a lower note. Played on a piano, those notes might be G-E.

The waiter began talking to me in French, but I gawked back at him dumbly. Despite six years of high school and college French and two trips to France, I'm ashamed to say I can't speak enough of that beautiful language to get by--not even in a tourist restaurant. Embarrassed, I admitted as much to the waiter, who switched to English and lamented, "Oh, but you have such a good bonjour!"

Have you ever heard a comedian pretend to speak a foreign language but actually speak gibberish? If it sounds convincing nevertheless, it's because the performer understands that different languages have different songs, and he or she "gets" the music of that particular tongue.

Spoken language is more than just words uttered in a monotone; it's a pattern of pitch and intonation. Some languages may sound more melodious to our ears than others do. Think of the distinctively musical sound of Italian, with its trilled r's, extended vowels, and soft consonants. Compare that to the more guttural sound of German, a tongue that some people find harsh. Listen to the lilting sound of Hawaiian, with its five vowels and just seven consonants--h, k, l, m, n, p, and w. The Chinese language relies on tone as well as on pronunciation. A change in tone can change the whole meaning of a word. In southwestern Africa, the indigenous Khoisan languages are best known for their melodious sounds and clicks. [dagger] The ancient language of the !Kung people is said to have up to 48 distinct clicking sounds.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Which Came First, Language or Music?

Some people think African click languages might be living remnants of the oldest spoken language. Could be. Scientists working to trace the most ancient population of human beings--and therefore the beginnings of humanity--followed DNA evidence to the Khoisan people. That leads some scholars to suggest that click sounds might have been a component of the first languages. (If you get jazzed thinking about this kind of stuff, you should consider going into linguistics.)

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

All of which raises the question: Which came first, music or spoken language? The answer is easy: No one knows. Both arose long before the beginning of recorded history, so it's a guessing game. We do know that Neanderthals made flutes from animal bones some 53,000 years ago.

Whether those early hominids could speak beyond grunts and, perhaps, clicks is a matter of much debate. Fossils suggest that their vocal cords hot to mention their brains--were probably not able to produce real speech.

Both language and music are simply ways of organizing sounds into a meaningful system of communication. Could speech have arisen intonation: the rising or falling pitch of the voice when speaking; the accuracy of pitch n performing music from the need to communicate information? Could music have grown out of the need to express emotion? (They say music is the "universal language.") If you think of the whoops and wails we make when we express great emotion, you can see how those sounds might have formed the ancient foundations of music. Or not.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Musical Mirrors

Maybe we don't have to go back to prehistoric times to search for the link between language and music. Maybe the answer lies in the wilderness between our ears. How--and where does the brain react to musical stimulation? to language? (If this sort of thing gets your juices flowing, you might consider becoming a neuroscientist.)

The answer: No one knows. However, researchers have made some curious findings. Aniruddh Patel, a senior fellow at the Neurosciences Institute, in San Diego, Calif., focuses on the relationship between music and language. In one study, he charted the patterns of intonation, pace, and stress of spoken English and French. He then used a similar technique to chart the rhythm and pitch of classical music written by famous English and French composers, such as Sir Edward Elgar and Claude Debussy.

Patel discovered that a composer's native language was reflected in the stress and intonation of his music. That is, a composer's work is the musical mirror of his or her primary spoken language. The connection is also apparent in other musical forms--even jazz seems to echo a composer's language.

"The techniques we present can be applied to the language and music of any culture," Patel told Discovery News. Pop music is an exception. "Pop," he says, "may involve a lot more borrowing of musical styles from other cultures, which would blur any differences."

In an experiment conducted by other researchers, subjects listened to a series of pleasingly harmonic chords. When a dissonant chord was played, a region in the brain's right hemisphere responded. When a subject listened to an ungrammatical sentence, the exact same region of the brain reacted ... in the left hemisphere! Naturally, it's all much more complicated than that but maybe music and language are something like mirror-image identical twins--the same but different.

Lyrical Prose

So OK, maybe we can think of poetry and song lyrics as twins. Poetry can sound very musical. Song lyrics can sound like poetry.

What about prose? Is prose the tone-deaf cousin? Prose is writing or speech in its normal continuous form, without the rhythmic or visual line structure of poetry. It's the ordinary, everyday language that we speak. This article is written in prose. When you simply want to convey information, your prose has no need of music.

"Percent Daily Values are based on a 2,000 calorie diet. Your daily values may be higher or lower depending on your calorie needs."

--nonlyrical prose from a box of granola bars

Occasionally, though, prose likes to dip its toe in the musical tide. When prose is expressive and sounds poetic, it is said to be lyrical. (Hmm, check out that root word!) In Kiran Desai's novel The Inheritance of Loss, which switches setting between the Himalayas and New York City, the prose is often quite lyrical.

Listen, for example, to the slow, lullaby hush of this line.

   They sipped and ate, all of existence passed
   over by nonexistence, the gate leading
   nowhere, and they watched the tea spill
   copious ribbony curts of vapor, watched
   their breath join the mist slowly twisting
   and turning, twisting and turning.

Compare that to the dry drumbeat of this passage from the same book.

   Biju approached Tom & Tomoko's--"No jobs."
   McSweeney's Pub--"Not hiring."
   Freddy's Wok--"Can you ride a bicycle?"
   Yes, he could.

Now hear the crashing cacophony of this scene.

   General Tso's chicken, emperor's pork, and
   Biju on a bicycle with the delivery bag on
   his handlebars, a tremulous figure between
   heaving buses, regurgitating taxis-what
   growls, what sounds of fiatulenee came from
   this traffic. Biju pounded at the pedals,
   heckled by taxi drivers direct from Punjab.
   ... They harassed Biju with such blows from
   their horns as could split the world into
   whey and solids: paaaaaawWW!

Ringing Out

To really hear the music in writing, of course, it helps to read passages aloud. One American writer--and yes, he was a writer--who understood the power of the musically spoken word was Martin Luther King Jr. In his speeches, he borrowed heavily from the techniques of poetry and song because he knew they would help his words ring and resonate in the minds of his listeners. Here is an excerpt from his most famous speech, "I Have a Dream," which he delivered at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963. Look at--better yet, listen to--how King uses repetition, rhythm, and alliteration to pound out his message. Go on, read it aloud.

   With this faith, we will be able to hen, out of
   the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With
   this faith, we will be able to transform the
   jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful
   symphony of brotherhood. With this
   faith, we will be able to work together, to pray
   together, to struggle together, to go to jail
   together, to stand up for freedom together,
   knowing that we will be free one day.

Do you hear the music? On that day, the whole country heard it. Listen!

   And so let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New
      Hampshire.
   Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York.
   Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania.
   Let freedom ring from the snow-capped Rockies of Colorado.
   Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California.
   But not only that:
   Let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia.
   Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee.
   Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi.
   From every mountainside, let freedom ring.

Can you hear those words and phrases singing? That, my friends, is some fine writing. By the way, where did King get the line "Let freedom ring"? From the lyrics to a song, of course.

guttural: rough or grating, produced in the throat

audible: capable of being heard

monotone: a sound especially in speech, that does not rise and fail in pitch but stays on the same tone all the time

pitch: the position of a sound or the musical scale

dissonant: jarring, unharmonious

cacophony: an unpleasant combination of loud, often jarring, sounds

alliteration: the repetition o] initial sounds in two or more neighboring words, such as mighty mountains

* Most famous, perhaps, is Leroy Anderson's 1950 piece "The Typewriter." You can hear it at www.leroy-anderson.com/la-mp3/typewriter.mp3.

[dagger] An example of an African click language can be heard in the 1980 film The Gods Must Be Crazy.