Diacritiques

Rock and Pop, that is. We knew already that your brain’s boosted by listening to Bach and Brahms.

There is, at the very least, quite a bit of anecdotal evidence suggesting that the task of decoding allusions in their favourite songs can send kids to the library or have them start earnest dinner-table discussions with their families.

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In yesterday’s Guardian, Ian Sample, a science correspondent, writes about an intriguing approach to pinning down those intractable differences between national styles in (classical) music. Researchers from San Diego attribute them to the composers’ respective native languages:

[The researchers] found that English had more of a swing than French, a rhythm produced by a tendency in English to cut some vowels short while stressing others. The melodies of the two languages also differed, with pitch varying far more in spoken English than French.

The team then did the same kind of analysis on music, comparing the rhythm and melody of English classical music from composers such as Elgar, Holst and Vaughan Williams, with that of French composers including Debussy, Fauré and Roussel. “The music differs in just the same way as the languages,” said Dr Patel. “It is as if the music carries an imprint of the composer’s language.”

The first point refers to what is called stress-timed vs syllable-timed languages, which is very noticeable in poetry. (I realized only recently that the French definition of the alexandrine meter — a particularly important one in French poetry — is totally different from the one I learnt in high school (in Germany). The notions overlap, and every German or English alexandrine is also a French one, but the actual meters function quite differently.)

Still, poetry is language, and symphonies or string quartets aren’t. Debussy, Fauré and Roussel might sound similar (compared to non-French romantic composers) because they actually worked together, or because they competed on the same marketplace for music, or because they were trained at the similar institutions and under the same standards.

The idea is a fascinating one, however, even if I wonder how it would apply to other periods than late romanticism. What about Handel, Purcell, Lully, Couperin, Rameau, Bach, Buxtehude, Telemann, Corelli, Albinoni, Vivaldi and Geminiani? Could they be told apart as well? Did Handel compose with the accent of a German who learned English in Italy?

Update: Nature’s news site talks about the paper all this is based on here.

Les coups doux de la sérendipité (faites défiler, l’explication est en bas de page) m’ont amené une découverte merveilleuse. Il y a un nouveau blogue francophone s’intéressant à la langue  — il y en a franchement pas assez pour l’instant. C’est Langue sauce piquante, le blogue des correcteurs du Monde, Martine Rousseau et Olivier Houdart.

J’y ai déjà trouvé plein de choses intéressantes, des ressources linguistiques français-arabe par exemple, ou le Musée virtuel des dictionnaires. Des billets aussi, comme celui sur l’argot des poilus. (Serais-je rigoloboche ? Question épineuse … ).

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Nice crop of downloadable online media. The political first: Ifilm has Theo van Gogh and Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s film Submission as an Apple Quicktime (.mov) file. Via Viewropa. Still on Viewropa, I found this collection of mp3 Rock/Pop songs that are available for download. As a fan of Beth Gibbons, I was particularly taken with […]

This happened on Monday the 8th in Eindhoven: Dutch Muslim school hit by bomb (ici un lien vers un article en français). And today, another Muslim primary school in Ude was set on fire (in Dutch). The article says that graffiti saying “Theo R.I.P” and drawings of the “white power” sign were found […]

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