Written by Joe Linstroth
Language and music are inseparable. Both rely on sounds, symbols, and culture-specific conventions that are used to communicate and convey social meaning.
Language and music also change in complex ways as they interact with each other. For example, how is music interpreted in sign language? What about hip-hop written in a different language?
These are just some of the questions that linguistics professor Dr. Morgan Sleeper ’11 and her students explore in their “Language and Music” class.
In what important ways are language and music connected?
The class will explore this question in four different ways. One is the idea of “music in language,'' or the musical elements found in language, such as pitch, rhythm, rhythm, and melody.
Another field is “music as a language.” What do we mean by music? What do we mean by language? In a way, it's obvious. If you're having a conversation in the kitchen, it might be language; if you're performing on stage at a concert, it might be music. But there are also many things in between. What would happen if you were walking down the street singing and talking to yourself?
We also look at the confluence of what we speak of as the “language of music.” How do people talk about music in terms of evaluation? And when we talk about music, how do people teach it, relate to it, and form their identities?
What we spend the most time in class is the concept of “language in music.” When music and language interact, what does music change about language, and vice versa? How does it change when we speak and sing language?
How do music and sign language interact?
First, there is a misconception that all deaf people are not interested in music. Many people who are hearing impaired can listen to auditory music in a variety of ways. But when music interacts with sign language, the multimodality we think of when it comes to language and music really breaks down.
Music in general is very diverse. When you're listening to music, you need more than just audio. You're at a concert, moving around, not only hearing something, but also seeing and feeling something. It brings out memories and associations related to this music. It's more than a sound, it's an experience. Once you understand the idea of music and sign language, you add the modality of visual language on top of that.
One example is “Song Translation,” which creates videos that translate popular songs into sign language. In some cases, he uses the original audio as his backing track and performs in sign language. This allows the background auditory music to have one rhythm, while the rhythm of the sign language translation may have a different time signature; This creates the potential for creative disagreements. They can then match on interesting points, for example for emotional effect. Auditory and visual, he can experience music in two different ways at the same time.
How does hip-hop change in different languages?
Hip-hop is a great example. Because there's a sense of connectedness throughout the country, sometimes referred to as the “global hip-hop nation.” But a key tenet of hip-hop is connecting to local places. One of the ways people do that is through language. People can creatively manipulate the way they use language within hip-hop to not just talk about place, but to actually show their connection to place through their language choices. In Quebec, for example, there is a very strong mainstream ideology of monolingual French, meaning that French and English are the languages of Quebec. But much of Quebec's hip-hop actually also incorporates the languages of other immigrant communities that exist there, such as varieties of French, varieties of English, and even languages such as Haitian Creole and Spanish. It will be hip hop using all code switches. The idea is that by playing up this linguistic reality that people see in their daily lives in Quebec, they are resisting the mainstream ideology that Quebec is for French or English-speaking people. .
Hip-hop also changes structurally depending on the language. What we often associate with hip-hop is the idea that flow and rhyme structure are very important, but that can look very different in different languages. For example, rhyming in Japanese hip-hop is not necessarily constructed based on syllabic structure. It is often based on what is called a mora structure or mora. For example, a word like “Japan” in Japanese has two syllables, but it has four moras: “ni”, “pu”, “po”, and “n”, which is how people rhyme and pronounce it. It affects how you do things. Hip hop in Japanese.
How did your undergraduate experience with Mac influence your approach to teaching?
It influenced everything I did. One of the biggest things is that during my undergraduate years he was really open to interdisciplinary work at Mac, which shaped all of my trajectory through linguistics. I was always encouraged by my instructors to understand the connections between classes and things I was interested in. That's what inspired me to explore language and music together. I was taking a linguistics class and an ethnomusicology class and was excited about the synergies I saw there and the opportunity to connect with them. The kind of encouragement I received from the faculty here doesn't happen anywhere else, at the undergraduate or graduate level. The opportunity to combine my interests while at Mac is what led me here, and I try to bring that interdisciplinary thinking into everything I do in the classroom.
Joe Linstroth is McAlester's director of media relations.