Society for Music Theory

Two Ways in Which Music Relates to the World

Author(s): Fred Lerdahl
Source: Music Theory Spectrum, Vol. 25, No. 2 (Autumn, 2003), pp. 367-373
Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the Society for Music Theory
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TWO WAYS IN WHICH MUSIC RELATES TO THE WORLD

infant interplay, and expressive gestural communication.

These causes are not mutually exclusive.
One suggestive idea in this volume, by Steven Brown, is
that music first emerged together with language in a "musilanguage" that eventually split into the two modalities that
we recognize today. The notion that music and language
have the same source goes back at least to Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, who wrote:

Essay:

Two Waysin WhichMusic Relates

to the World
FRED LERDAHL

With the first voices came the first articulations or sounds formed according to the respective passions that dictated them . . .Thus verse,
singing, and speech have a common origin. The first discourses were
the first songs. The periodic recurrences and measures of rhythm, the
melodious modulations of accents, gave birth to poetry and music along
with language.2

Of all the arts, music possesses the most technical vocabulary.This state of affairsgives music theorists the ability to
speak and write about music with enviable precision,but it
also isolates us. Technical training in music theory is a specialized endeavor.Nonmusicians, and even musicians who
are not theoreticallyinclined, do not easily understandus.
From our isolation and their incomprehension comes the
tendencyto regardmusic as existing in a bubble,unrelatedto
anything else in the world. This view is surely mistaken.
Here, I shall discuss two respects in which music relates to
the world beyond itself:its common origin and sharedstructures with language, and its projectionof intuitions of tension, attraction,and agency through the internalizationof
motion. Both aspectsarefundamentalto musicalemotion.
Music exists in complex form only in the human species,
and it appearsin all human societies. How did it arise?Early
ethnomusicologistswere concerned with this question, but
in recent decadesthe issue has largelybeen neglected.A sign
of recent reengagement is a rather speculative book, The
Originsof Music, in which biologists, paleontologists, evolutionary psychologists, and anthropologists propose that
music-makingconferredan evolutionaryadvantageupon our
distant ancestors.1The hypothesized causes for the musical
capacity include Darwinian sexual selection, synchronized
group behavior, social bonding during grooming, mother-

Brown's evolutionary argument is very general, but it can

be supported by two lines of contemporary evidence. The
first comes from the brain sciences. The neuropsychologist
Isabelle Peretz has reached some telling conclusions based
on patterns of behavioral deficits in patients with brain
lesions.3 First, musical processing divides into two broad
components, rhythm and pitch. Second, musical and linguistic processing share certain deficits but not others. On one
hand, rhythmic processing takes place in the same areas of
the brain for both language and music. On the other, lexical
retrieval and syntax in language and pitch processing in
music are activated in different areas of the brain. Contour
recognition appears to take place in a different brain area
than interval recognition and to precede it in processing, so
that tone-deaf people are usually able to speak with normal
contour but contour-deaf people are necessarily tone-deaf.
These conclusions are supported in part by new imaging
techniques that track local brain activation.
The second line of evidence comes from theoretical accounts of linguistic and musical cognitive capacities. The

Wallin, et al., 2001.

367

Rousseau [1760] 1966, 50.

Peretz 1993 and Patel & Peretz 1997.

368

MUSIC THEORY SPECTRUM 25 (2003)

linguistic capacity has three broad components: semantics,

syntax, and phonology. Music does not, except peripherally,
have semantics in a linguistic sense, which includes lexical
items as well as concepts such as referenceand entailment.
Nor does music have a specificallylinguistic syntax, which
includes parts of speech, labeled phrase structures,negation,
anaphora, and so forth. Rather, the linguistic component
that most resemblesmusic is phonology, which, like music,
concerns the organizationof sound in time. The sounds of
sentences break up into units of phrases and words; these
units decompose into patterns of stressed and unstressed
sounds and of long and short sounds, and they form rising
and falling contours.
All of these phonological featureshave musical counterparts. In a recent article I develop these parallelsthrough a
treatment of the sounds of a short poem, "Nothing Gold
Can Stay"by Robert Frost, entirely as if they were musical
sounds, ignoring their meaning and syntax.4The sounds of
the poem areput through the grouping,metrical,and reductional components of Lerdahl &Jackendoff 1983 (hereafter
GTTM), and through a newly devised method for the derivation of contour.The analyticprocedurerelies on aspectsof
generativephonological theory, specificallythe prosodic hierarchy, stress theory, and contour theory.5 Briefly, the
prosodic hierarchydescribesthe grouping of speech sounds
into the levels of the syllable,word or clitic group,phonological phrase, intonational phrase, and utterance. The stress
theory uses a notation similarto GTTM's metricalgrid and
representshierarchicalpatternsof syllabicstress. Stressesare
assignedcyclicallyover the prosodicgroupings.
After these structuresare established,the model assigns
metrical structureby finding the optimal match between a
permissiblemetricalgrid and the stresspattern,essentiallyas

in the musical case. Syllables are placed not only to match

stress and grid but also to maximize, through relative distances between attack points, the perceptualprojection of
the constituents of the prosodic hierarchy.In this way long
and short durationsare assigned to syllables.It may be objected that languageand even meteredpoetry are not spoken
with periodicitybetween metrical accents. However, limericks and many short verses are recited with great metrical
regularity,6and music is never played by human performers
with complete isochrony.7The difference is one of degree.
Periodic meter is an idealized mental construct for both
music and poetry.
The derivationof contour follows largely from the stress
grid, since the perceptionof relativestress is primarilya result of relative pitch height, not of intensity, as one might
suppose.8 Following intonational theory and data,9 which
establishfocal pitches usuallynearthe onset of syllableseven
though pitch height continuously modulates, the model
posits four levels of tone height, with glides assumed between levels. In other languages the treatment of pitch
height might vary.Within the four-level framework,pitch
height is assigned via the stress grid from global to local
levels, guided by a few paradigmaticshapes.'0
The addition of contour to the metrical and durational
assignmentsyields the normativerealizationof the poem in
musical notation shown in Example 1. Contained within
this seemingly transparentnotation are the structuresof the
prosodic hierarchy,phonological stress, the metrical grid,
duration,and pitch height.11
6
7
8
9
10

Lerdahl 2001a.
For prosodic hierarchy,see Hayes 1989; for stress theory, Liberman &
Prince 1977; and for countour theory, Pierrehumbert 1980 and Ladd
1996.

II

Oehrle 1989.
Gabrielsson 1999.
Handel 1989.
Reviewed in Ladd 1996.
This method bears comparison to the pitch-contour tradition in music
theory, in particularthe contour reduction algorithm in Morris 1993.
The phonologist William Idsardi recently apprised me of Frost's reading of this poem, recorded in Paschen and Mosby 2001. Frost's rendition is extremely close to that represented in Example 1.

TWO WAYS IN WHICH MUSIC RELATES TO THE WORLD

a specificmannerthe otherwisevague intuition that listening

to a piece of music is like taking a journey.When allied to
words, pitch-space paths take on a narrativedimension as
well.
The pitch-spacetheory also enablesthe predictionof patterns of tension and relaxationas events unfold. Four conditions are needed to make valid predictions.First, there must
be a component that derives and represents hierarchical
event structure,since tension is judged hierarchicallymore
than sequentially.17This goal is accomplished by an improvedversion of GTTM's prolongationalanalysis.Second,
there must be a calculationof the perceiveddistancebetween
any two chords, something the model does with great accuracy.Third, there must be a treatmentof surfaceor sensory
dissonance.Although this topic has been studied extensively
by psychoacousticians,its behavior in musical contexts is
complex, and here the theory settles for an approximate
implementation.Fourth, there must be a model of melodic
and harmonic attractions.The theory succeeds in this goal,
subjectto computationalfine-tuning from experimentalevidence that is only beginning to become available.18Carol
Krumhansl and I have undertaken an ongoing empirical
study of the predictions of the tension model over a wide
range of diatonic and chromaticmusic.The correlationsbetween predictionsand data are generallyvery high, and they
permit detailed and illuminating interpretationsabout listeners'responses.19
According to this theoretical and empirical perspective,
then, not only the linguistic but also the musical capacity
employs space and motion in a constitutive way. This employment is not just cognitive in a disembodiedsense but is a
17

i8
19

This conclusion is sustained by empirical data on hierarchical and sequential predictions, as reported in Lerdahl, et al., 2000.
See also Larson 2002 and Margulis 2003.
A preliminary version of this research appears in Lerdahl and Krumhansl 2003. For a historical review of music theories of tonal motion,
tension, and attraction, see Rothfarb 2002.

37I

cause of the visceral sense of the ebb and flow of musical

tension.20
Recall Pinker'sstatement:"Locationin space is one of the
two fundamentalmetaphorsin language.The other is force,
agency,and causation."The theory of tonal attractionbrings
force into the picture of musical space and motion. Like a
spaceshipmoving among the moons of Jupiter,a melody or
chord progressionmoves in a certaindirectionbut is affected
in its velocity and direction by the relative gravitationalor
attractiveforce of other pitches and chords. A neighboring
ornamentmay have little effect on its motion, but a tonic has
considerablemass and may bring the tonal spaceshipto rest.
But what of agency and causation?Pinker refersto a classic experimentby Heider & Simmel (1944), in which they
made a cartoon film using three dots that were perceivedby
subjects as moving not as inanimate objects but as animate
agents.Pinkerwrites:
Agents are recognized by their ability to violate intuitive physics by
starting, stopping, swerving, or speeding up without an external nudge,
especially when they persistently approach or avoid some other object.
The agents are thought to have an internal and renewable source of
energy, force, impetus, or oomph, which they use to propel themselves,
usually in the service of a goal.21

Similarly,a melody or chord progressiondoes not simply

follow the inertial path of least resistance.It would be dull
and would quickly come to a stop unless enlivened by motion away from places that pull it toward rest. Such motion
works against inertia and seems to be caused by an animate
agent. Furthermore,such motion causes an emotional response. Echoing Pinker, the neurologist Antonio Damasio
writes:
You can find the basic configurations of emotions in simple organisms,
even in unicellular organism . . . You can do the same thing with a
simple chip moving about on a computer screen. Some jagged fast
movements will appear "angry,"harmonious but explosive jumps will
20
2I

See Brower 2000.

Pinker 1997, 322.

MUSIC THEORY SPECTRUM 25 (2003)

372

look "joyous,"recoiling motions will look "fearful."A video that depicts

several geometric shapes moving about at different rates and holding
varied relationships reliably elicits attributions of emotional state from
normal adults and even children. The reason why you can anthropomorphize the chip or an animal so effectively is simple: emotion, as
the word indicates, is about movement, about externalized behavior,
about certain orchestrations of reactions to a given cause, within a given
environment.22

Here is a centralsourceof musical emotion. We internalize the motion of pitches and chords in reaction to contextual tonal forces in musical space. We attributeagency and
causation to musical motions that violate intuitive physics
and inevitabilityto motions that yield to musical inertia and
force.The characterof the musicalmotions, which is shaped
also by their temporal realization, mirrors equivalent motions in the "real"physical world. We map specific musical
motions onto specific emotional qualities,again in reflection
of real-worldequivalences.
This argument about musical space, motion, force,
agency,and emotion rejoins the earlierdiscussion about the
origin of"musilanguage"in expressiveauditorygestures.But
language lacks pitch structureexcept in the most rudimentary sense. Perhaps music is the quintessentiallyemotional
art because its elaboratepitch structuresso richly and precisely reflect motion, force, and agency,and therefore emotions, in the outerworld.
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