Music rhythm, Linguistic rhythm, and Aesthetics

Today something struck me when I was watching the CCTV New Years program 2007. During one popular song of that year, "吉祥三寶", actually a Mongolian song, due to the programming, the song was sung first in Mandarin and then in Mongolian. It was very obvious that it sounded dull in Mandarin but much more interesting and likable in Mongolian.

From this phenomenon, which I'm confident that most Mandarin speaker would agree with me, I see the first reaction by me is that Mandarin is very monosyllabic (and having a low variability in terms of syllable structure), in contrast with Mongolian.

Meanwhile this doesn't mean all Mandarin songs are dull to listen to. There are plenty of them that people find likable, but this one is just not one of them.

Thus comes the question: Does Mandarin vocal music have a tendency to prefer certain rhythmic types in music when text setting, thus to complement the feature (low variability in syllable structure) of its linguistic rhythm? If so, to what extent does this principle apply and to what genres/times? How about other languages? Can we in general find a foundation for the preference of musical rhythm in a certain culture as related to linguistic rhythmic features in similar ways?

In fact, while this might be viewed as an explanation of the link between m/l rhythms, such as proposed by Patel (also touches upon variability index), this is actually counter Patel's argument about English and French, because in his study instrumental music rhythm tends to have the same relative value on nPVI as the linguistic rhythm, keeping them consistent. So this might shed light on how are we going to see the whole picture. Is it possible that the preferred instrumental musical rhythmic type in a given culture is shaped by its linguistic rhythmic feature, where vocal music serves as a medium state? (first have preferred vocal music rhythm that can compliment the linguistic rhythmic feature, then expand to music)?

Meter Perception at Different Tempo

Today we're in Music in Southeast Asia, and this piece came up, which most of us grad students distinctively perceived as duple meter but Ben Pachter argued that it is triple. At first I didn't get it, but then I thought about the Irish fiddle melody, and then I realized this is really triple grouped into a higher level of four beats, so it's triple basically rather than a dotted duple. The tricky thing is that (1) the faster tempo here created the confusion. At a slower tempo (such as French suite) and with the absence of the higher level duple grouping, there is no chance that we can misperceived it. (2)The triplets did not really appear in this example, so the confusion.

There is something here between the interplay of tempo and rhythm perception.

Identifying Complex Meters

Rules of the process of identifying complex meters (e.g.Middle Eastern music). First step: identifying the level of counting, which can be misleading.If one level doesn't work well, often moving to the next level is a must. Sometimes both levels can work. What are the rules that govern this perception? What are the cues implicitly used in identifying meter?

Minimalism

Minimalist music employs the minimum number of musical elements and builds up the whole piece using the very limited inventory. It is often said that what's interesting here is that what appears to be repetitive actually sounds very different every time you listen. I don't see that. I think it's interesting to manipulate a small amount of parameters to shift very gradually in a low rate. It's kind of like a linguistic continuum:Before you realize it its already so different that you cannot recognize it.

It would be very intriguing to look at the semantic/emotional response out of the minimalist music. It's not cyclical in the sense of gamelan; when I listen to this I think it has the power to freeze my mind, like I'm thinking deeply into something or a memory. When I'm in this state of mind I might also produce such music.What is the link here?

Another point we recently talked about often is that there are so many parameters in music that can actually play a role in the perception of the semantics of the music--or emotional response. No one parameter (such as pitch in major and minor) can do all the trick. The rich relationship here is worth exploring.

The Sittaford Mystery

Having gone through all my other Christie collections, such as Destination Unknown;White Horse Hotel; The Murder of Roger Ackroyd; The Body in the Library; The ABC Murders; Partner in Crime; Murder on the Oriental Express; Murder in Mesopotamia; Dumb Witness;Murder under the Sun; Death on the Nile, and so on, I'm not so pleased with the ending of Sittaford. The process of solving the case was very good; Emily and Mr.Enderby was lively portrayed; but the whole table turning business and especially Major Burnaby's motive is not very convincing.

Dinosaur and Human

Today I saw two different relevant information on the history of the earth. One is a book on the origin of language and music, the other saying that "it's official" that the cause of dinosaur's extinction is the asteroid. I felt two things: one, the dinosaur lived on earth for 160million years before it happened;and they were considered one of the dominant species on the planet. Our human have only a few thousand years of recorded history and we sometimes think that we know everything and we are so great. It's way too short, and there is no reason that we should be thinking we're doing good or we're going to do good for long. Second, the whole business of prehistory is hard. I would like to know how evolutionary linguists I read today made this endeavor from speculation to hard science. The dinosaur is the same. Human is too small in the universe and even in the history of earth it is not worth mentioning yet. The future is uncertain. Somehow I have always felt, like Einstein's example of a two dimension cow trying to understand the three dimension world, there is something that human is not capable of understanding. It is simply beyond our understanding because of the scale--we are too small. This includes whether god exists. Don't ever be arrogant; don't think you are sure that you know everything. It's not possible.

Do dreams mean?

Dreaming is a big part of my life---although lucid dreaming is hardly possible for me so far. Yesterday I dreamed i was bathing, a rather uncommon theme in my dream. Then I realized why ancient Chinese people trying to use dreams to predict the future luck---it's all about chances. Most dreams if we do remember, are insignificant---just a reflection of your daily or remote (but deep) experiences. But dreams with a low frequency of appearing is precious. What does that mean then? what is the significance of this uncommon happening? There you go.

I sometimes think that Chinese philosophy has a different way of seeing things. Fengshui is one thing. When one is stuck in some state of mind, rather like "possessed" sometimes than some more scientific terms, but it's kind of cool to think of it in terms of being possessed and fengshui and all that. Sometimes people simply cannot control themselves even on their own behavior, thus came the idea of being controlled temporarily by someone else, some mystical power. It's true that we sometimes don't understand why we cannot control even our own behavior even though we think we can.

It happened to turn out that dreaming of bathing is a very good sign, meaning either healthy or lucky/happy, so I'm glad about it and rather believe it.:)