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Do Music and Language Obey the Same Rules? 384
Emre Sevinc writes "Ever felt as though a piece of music is speaking to you? You could be right: musical notes are strung together in the same patterns as words in a piece of literature, according to an Argentinian physicist. This article in Nature states that Damián H. Zanette's analysis also reveals a key difference between tonal compositions, which are written in a particular key, and atonal ones, which are not. This sheds light on why many people find it so hard to make sense of atonal works. In both written text and speech, the frequency with which different words are used follows a striking pattern. In the 1930s, American social scientist George Kingsley Zipf discovered that if he ranked words in literary texts according to the number of times they appeared, a word's rank was roughly proportional to the inverse of the its frequency squared. Herbert Simon later offered an explanation for this mathematical relationship. He argued that as a text progresses, it creates a meaningful context within which words that have been used already are more likely to appear than other, random words. For example, it is more likely that the rest of this article will contain the word 'music' than the word 'sausage'. Physicist Damian Zanette of the Balseiro Institute in Bariloche, Argentina, used this idea to test whether different types of music create a semantic context in a similar fashion."
Ut oh. (Score:5, Funny)
Ut oh.-Rewind. (Score:2, Funny)
Buy a pair of polyester bell-bottom pants, and wear lots of jewelry.
Re:Ut oh. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Ut oh. (Score:3, Funny)
Well how about music from spam?
Well, since we already have poetry from spam [google.com] we have the lyrics. So just add a tune. I hear something like the cheesy music you hear at a circus with the clowns.
Well, there's (Score:3, Funny)
Sausages and the meaning of it all (Score:5, Insightful)
The fact that sausage was written down, means you are more likely to use it, and the fact that it said it wouldn't appear makes it 284% more likely to appear in each post.
Sausages. Hi to Rich sausages.
Re:Ut oh. (Score:5, Funny)
Hmm (Score:4, Funny)
(It had to be said.)
Re:Hmm (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Hmm (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Hmm (Score:2)
Re:Hmm (Score:4, Funny)
>>> Sausage
Re:Hmm (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Hmm (Score:5, Interesting)
The artwork's potential is never higher than in that magic moment when the first brushstroke is applied, the first chord struck. But as the piece grows, technique and craft take over, and imagination becomes a less useful tool. A piece grows by becoming specific. The moment Herman Melville penned the opening line. "Call me Ishmael", one actual story - Moby Dick--began to separate itself from a multitude of imaginable others. And so on through the following five hundred-odd pages, each successive sentence in some way had to acknowledge and relate to all that preceded. Joan Didion nailed this issue squarely (and with trademark pessimism) when she said, "What's so hard about that first sentence is that you're stuck with it. Everything else is going to flow out of that sentence. And by the time you've laid down the first two sentences, your options are all gone."
It's the same for all media: the first few brushstrokes to the blank canvas satisfy the requirements of many possible paintings, while the last few fit only that painting - they could go nowhere else. The development of an imagined piece into an actual piece is a progression of decreasing possibilities, as each step in execution reduces future options by converting one - and only one - possibility into a reality. Finally, at some point or another, the piece could not be other than it is, and it is done.
Re:Hmm (Score:5, Insightful)
Your description seems to perpetuate the romantic myth of the work of art as an organic whole, and the artist as some sort of shaman, who works as a medium for the artwork. I'm not saying this is totally wrong -- the artist is probably just as much a medium as the cause of the artwork.
Re:Hmm (Score:3, Interesting)
I agree with you.
I consider writing, painting, and drawing to work in the same way. It never is created in a straight progression from beginning to end as the perceiver reads/views it. There is almost always the initial layout phase, which then continues into fleshing out the concept and then into working the details out as they should be. You can see evidence of this in every area of human design. Buildings aren't built by placing a stick of wood in the ground and then adding more on, regardless of how L
Re:Hmm (Score:5, Insightful)
You mean, like all performing artists. I know you referenced the creative and visual arts, but as the article is also about music, wouldn't it be only fair to consider the performing arts? As a classical musician, I typically perform pieces written by others. My art is the performance. If you chose to listen to me, you would experience my art from beginning to end, in the order I would create it. In a performance, you can't take back notes you've already played. Often times, my interpretation is subject to change (even if only slightly from what I've prepared and practiced) with the mood of the particular performance. Part of the artistry is in never performing the same work the same way twice, so in that sense, the art is being created as and in the order in which the listener percieves it.
Re:Hmm (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Hmm (Score:3, Interesting)
Other changes simply aren't about distilation. What happens when an aut
Re:Hmm (Score:4, Informative)
This is all old news though.Herman Helmholtz noted that musical scales and their intervals tend to mimic the mother languages rises and falls in pitch and make them available to the musician for phrasing.
A good example of this would be Indian Raga and its 23 note octaves with rules on bending and sliding notes.
Re:Hmm (Score:5, Funny)
Research Validated (Score:5, Insightful)
Humor me for a minute. Trolls and offtopic posts (and opposing views that introduce counter-evidence and new concepts) are modded down because they threaten to make the song atonal (or polytonal), or "incomprehensible," as the article says. If you're a musician, you know that excessive accidentals make the specified key pointless and virtually nonexistent. It's frustrating to play, and sometimes not pleasing to listen to.
Re:Research Validated (Score:5, Funny)
If you're a musician, you know that excessive accidentals make the specified key pointless and virtually nonexistent.
That's generally referred to as jazz.
But when you do it on purpose, it's called heavy metal.
And when you do it on accident and then claim it's on purpose, it's called rock'n'roll.
But if you don't do it at all, it's called crap. ;)
Re:Research Validated (Score:3, Insightful)
Huh? Most heavy metal that *I* hear is heavily based on I-V progressions.
And a hell of a lot of "Rock'nRoll" is based on I-IV-V.
Hardly excessive accidentals, on purpose or not.
Re:Research Validated (Score:3, Interesting)
This is not at all true. What most people think of as "tonal" is the predominant 12 tone system in the western world. We grow up hearing it because every tune we hear is based on the 12 notes and every instrument is tuned to them. We are also used to the standard system of scales, i.e. if a piece is written in A minor, then
Well, (Score:4, Funny)
-fren
Implications for copyright? (Score:5, Insightful)
If motives of five to eight notes are regarded as "words", then why do judges let composers enforce copyrights [columbia.edu] on individual "words"? And how can anyone know whether a particular "word" is already taken [slashdot.org]?
Oh, and sausage :-)
Re:Implications for copyright? (Score:5, Interesting)
"Oh Romeo, doth thy name and for thy name which is no part of thee, take all of myself."
I might change it: "Romeo: drop that last name of yours and come fuck me."
I could maybe get away with: "Oh Tyrome, deny your family; declare yourself free, and come fuck me."
As a musician, it is hard not to copy, not to realize that I have just dreged up a Led Zepplin riff from the back of my mind. Often, it is impossible not to copy to some degree. There are only so many ways to play 'something in D minor that sounds scary'.
I guess my point is: It is horribly subjective. The current standard is: If a judge/jury can discern that a riff came from a specific source (like the Simpson's theme or Close Encounters) you are screwed. I am all for letting small riffs be considered the words of music, but the issue is, where does one draw the line?
Re:Implications for copyright? (Score:5, Funny)
Scary? I thought D minor was the saddest [imdb.com] of all keys?
Re:Implications for copyright? (Score:3, Funny)
That's all I have to say to you.
Re:Implications for copyright? (Score:5, Interesting)
Besides, if a 'word' is a motif of five to eight notes, a symphony would read like this: "Dmitri Shostakovich wrote this. Stalin was an overbearing ass. Stalin is dead now, and I'm still alive. Dmitri Shostakovich wrote this symphony. Suck it, Stalin."
Then again, works which repeat motifs tend to be more effective than works that go on without reiterating anything. Sort of like Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech, which uses that phrase over and over again to slam the point home.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
My girlfriend is listening to VH1... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:My girlfriend is listening to VH1... (Score:5, Funny)
Odd (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Odd (Score:3, Interesting)
Exactly. Nuance and timing. Pattern and frequency. Just like language.
the notes on the page are almost secondary as far as expression goes.
So, if your favorite song or composition was done entirely in 2 notes, but the timing was the same, it wouldn't seem that different to you?
Re:Odd (Score:5, Interesting)
The whistles were blown by actors [clangers.co.uk], using a script. When they aired the show, they found people writing in saying "my child insists the characters said X, Y and Z" - is he mad?
The thing is, the kids usually got it spot on.
Lucky they took out the swearing [clangers.co.uk] in the original script, then. Also of note is the final paragrah in that link, which says:
I took an episode of The Clangers to the 1984 E.B.U.
conference in Germany and showed it to the participants without my voice-
over. Afterwards I asked them whether they had been able to understand
what the Clangers were saying.
"But of course." they replied. "They are speaking perfect German."
"But no." said Gerd, "That is not so. They spoke only Swedish,"
Re:Odd (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Odd (Score:4, Interesting)
And anyone who doesn't get this should try to find a recording of Robert Morely or Peter Ustinov reading something. Fan-bloody-tastic.
For those not willing to take the effort, or who cannot find such a recording, you can at least rent the movie Arthur and just listen to John Gielgud, or Ghandi and listen to John Gielgud and Ben Kingsley, or Lawrence of Arabia and listen to Peter O'Toole, Alec Guiness, Anthony Quinn, Omar Sharif, Jack Hawkins, Jose Ferrer, Arthur Kennedy, Anthony Quayle and Claude Raines.
Turn off the picture and just listen to the music in the voices of that one.
KFG
Re:Odd (Score:3, Informative)
As for midi, try being moved by a synthisized speech of any good written work.
OK, just to make sure everyone gets this: MIDI, the Musical Instrument's Digital Interface, is a protocol for telling an instrument which notes to play, when to play them, when to stop playing them, the velocity to play them at and so on. It is not just the sound an old sound card makes while you're playing Doom. Yamaha have even made an acoustic piano that responds to MIDI. It sounds no more synthetic than punchcards used by
Re:Odd (Score:2)
Re:Odd (Score:2)
Is it really that difficult to imagine that you need both a good song and a good performance to achieve good music?
Re:Odd (Score:3, Informative)
Sheet music can convey timing, and to a lesser extent nuance, a major advantage over other tabulature forms. While I am not gifted with the ability ( I can't even read sheet ) I have met individuals who can translate the notes on the stave into "mental sound" for want of a better phrase. I believe this is considered the upper epsilon of sight-reading ability.
You may be interested to know that before the blossoming of broadcast and recorded performances, sheet music was the primary form of dissemination f
So what kind of music are they talking about? (Score:3, Funny)
I shudder to think what kind of conversation is analagous to old Bill Shatner's musical attempts.
Re:So what kind of music are they talking about? (Score:2)
...which is still music, just not the kind you prefer.
Not to say there isn't a total lack of quality mainstream hip-hop these days (even the new Beastie Boys sounds much like all the rest), but if you can't respect all genres of music, that tells me you really don't understand anything about music at all.
I'm not sure that's really true (Score:2)
Re:So what kind of music are they talking about? (Score:4, Funny)
but if you can't respect all genres of music, that tells me you really don't understand anything about music at all.
Respecting genres of music is like respecting religion. There's no point to it, and no practical value in doing so, other than if you don't, you might offend the liberals. ;)
Re:So what kind of music are they talking about? (Score:3, Insightful)
That's funny. When I say something like "I don't respect the stupid fuckers who pray to a dead carpenter and consider eating crackers and drinking wine to be a holy act", it's usually the conservatives who get offended.
Maybe it's just me.
Sematic composition of music? (Score:5, Interesting)
Blah blah blah. (Score:3, Insightful)
Language is Music.
Anyone who says otherwise is just singing out of tune.
Re:Blah blah blah. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Blah blah blah. (Score:2)
Re:Blah blah blah. (Score:4, Informative)
They were moving past de Sausure's model of signifier/signified, claiming a Nietzchean absence of the signified. Instead of underlying meaning, we have the text as a thing itself, that might suggest a deeper meaning (which is illusory), but really only "contains" "meaning" in the inter-relationships of it's components, in the concatenations.
Further, from a semiotic point of view, music or anything else created or even observed by man is a language of sorts.
Anyway, if I think about this crap any further, my little brain will have a big hurt.
Re:Blah blah blah. (Score:3, Interesting)
The purpose of language is to convey meaning. If meaning is conveyed through the use of a sound, then the purpose of language has been fulfilled. Thus, that sound is a form of language.
Eh? The purpose of language is to convey specific meaning. That's how come words have specific meanings (yes, even in English). What would the point of language be if I told you to pass the sugar and you thought I said "You fucking bitch you ruined my life!"
Music has no specific meaning that can be determined in its exp
Almost like politics (Score:3, Funny)
Wrap your brain around that one, Ashcroft.
Yeah (Score:5, Interesting)
Have you ever heard a musician compare improvising a solo to "telling a story [tripod.com]"(grep for "telling a story")
Ever heard a short musical idea described as a "phrase"? [irenejackson.com]
Listening to a good jazz solo is a lot like listening to a conversation: There are main points, and there are variations on that point. It should be grounded but not to repetative
What is the soloist doing when he attempts to "build"? Actually the ideal process hardly ever takes place--that is, it is hardly ever the case that a conscientious soloist plays a thinking solo for a hard-listening hearer--but when this does happen, the key process is memory. The soloist has to establish for the listener what the important POINT, the motif if you like, is, and then show as much as he can of what it is that he sees in that motif, extending the relationships of it to the basic while never giving the feeling that he has forgotten it. In other words, I believe that it should be a basic principle to use repetition, rather than variety--but not too much. The listener is constatnly making predictions; actual infinitesimal predictions as to whether the next event will be a repetition of something, or something different. The player is constantly either confimring or denying these predictions in the listener's mind. As nearly as we can tell (Kraehenbuehl at Yale and I), the listener must come out right about 50% of the time--if he is too successful in predicting, he will be bored; if he is too unsuccessful, he will give up and call the music "disoganized."
Thus if the player starts a repetitive pattern, the listener's attention drops away as soon as he has successfully predicted that it is going to continue. Then, if the thing keeps going, the attention curve comes back up, and the listener becomes interested in just how long the pattern is going to continue. Similarly, if the player never repeats anything, no matter how tremendous an imagnation he has, the listener will decide that the game is not worth playing, that he is not going to be able to make any predections right, and also stops litening. Too much difference is sameness: boring. Too much sameness is boring--but also different once in a while.
-Richmond Browne
Re:Yeah (Score:3, Informative)
Sorry I can't provide a link to the song... grin... but I am sure you all know where to find a copy.
Re:Yeah (Score:3, Informative)
Statistical basis for debate and magic (Score:2, Interesting)
Not exactly solid linking (Score:5, Insightful)
This doesn't mean that music can't communicate to us in recognizable patterns, simply that those patterns don't necessarily have much to do with language, if anything.
Re:Not exactly solid linking (Score:3, Interesting)
Obligatory Simpsons (Score:4, Funny)
Otto: Hey, my shoes are talking too!
Left Shoe: Don't worry. We won't hurt you.
Right Shoe: We only want to have some fun.
Not all THAT remarkable (Score:2, Interesting)
Reverse Causality (Score:5, Interesting)
Inexplicable (Score:4, Funny)
So, given my experiences downtown, "f***" has a frequency of what, 0.0001?
Sheesh, I'd swear people down there are capable of holding complete and intricate conversations using solely that word.
It must be the most musical word of all.
uses of the word (Score:2, Interesting)
and you'd be right!
uses of the word [justnet.com.au]
Re:uses of the word (Score:5, Funny)
Fuck! Fuck this fucking fuck!
The writer noted how he was impressed that in 5 words he could use 4 fucks, each a different part of speech.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
He broke the theory by mentioning sausages (Score:3, Insightful)
"I'm not trying to suggest that you want to give me all your money." "I don't doubt that you can do it."
talkbox (Score:2)
Smallest unit of musical meaning (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Smallest unit of musical meaning (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Smallest unit of musical meaning (Score:2)
(Seriously, though, I'm quite jealous that you got tritone@slashdot. I have tritone at gmail, orkut, kuro5hin, and a bunch of other places, but I was way too late to get it here)
Re:Smallest unit of musical meaning (Score:5, Informative)
I agree completely however, saying a piece has 572 As in it says nothing about the music. But it might say something about the statistical correlation between note frequency and tonal vs atonal composition.
Re:Smallest unit of musical meaning (Score:5, Interesting)
"(Don't call me Kid)" Jonny Lang and B.B. King were playing a show together at some state fair. B.B calls Jonny up during B.B.'s set to do a song together.
The song gets to the solo part and B.B. motions for Jonny to take the lead.
Jonny kicks out all the stops and plays a blistering solo that shows he's at the top of his game, he's out of his mind - he's damn good. He's doing bends, he's sliding all over, he's sweating with exertion and feeling.
Now it's B.B.'s turn.
B.B. closes his eyes, leans back -
And plays one note. And keeps playing it. With every bit of blues that ever happened to anyone all in that one note.
The crowd goes mad screaming.
Jonny got schooled. :)
Re:Smallest unit of musical meaning (Score:3, Informative)
1. Play a certain pitch any number of times. If you play the same pitch 2 or more times then you are playing an interval : a unison. Playing the same pitch several times in a row has a meaning to it.
2. Play a certain pitch once and only once, and don't play any other pitches. In this case there is no interval and there really isn't any meaning. I think this is what the poster above meant when he said that a single note by itself has no
Re:Smallest unit of musical meaning (Score:3, Informative)
Great story
To me, this kinda shows how silly the part of the article about atonal music is. In tonal music, certain notes are more important than others, and you play them more; repeating the notes that are important landmarks in the key (say, C and G in the key of C) is part of what helps establish the key.
Atonal music tries to defeat the tendency to create a tonal center by forbidding this kind of repetition. In serialism
Re:Smallest unit of musical meaning (Score:2)
But you forgot to count the intervals between the other tones.
AP Music Theory finals applies to someting... (Score:3, Informative)
When we were learning about cadences in music theory, my teacher likened them to punctuation. Half cadences are like commas, often predictably placed and leaving the need for resolution of an idea. Deceptive cadences are often like semicolons; you think the idea is going to end and then it catches you off-guard and keeps going (unless the piece/movement is simply ending in minor after being in major, but hush, you.) Plagal and authentic cadences are like periods because they give a feeling of resolution to the music ending on the tonic (I) chord. And finally, perfect authentic cadences are like exclamation points because they have extra power behind their resolution.
Of course, the fact that phrases have a rythmic rise and fall is quite accurate. That music can tell a story... very true. Where do you think musical pieces like Romeo and Juliet or the Legend of Alcobaca come from?
similarity between music and language (Score:5, Interesting)
This is pretty trivial. Zipf's Law is regarded in linguistics as a curiosity rather than a deep result. It doesn't really explain anything interesting about language. Music and language are both more and less similar than both following Zipf's Law suggests. On the one hand, as a previous poster has pointed out, language is meaningful. Music may have an emotional impact, but it isn't meaningful in the sense in which language is. On the other hand, there are deeper similarities in the formal structure, pointed out by Fred Lerdahl and Ray Jackendoff in their 1983 book A Generative Theory of Tonal Music [mit.edu].
music as a language (Score:5, Informative)
In my opinion, music has taught me way more about programming than the other way around. (and music is more difficult to do effectively -- it's all real-time -- even though the pay is much better for programming)
As a piano player for 37 years now, I always get a kick out of when I can play stuff that's just notes, and it makes people laugh. It's all about expectation and fulfillment.
Partly, my ability to do so springs from my experience playing musical underscore for melodrama shows (e.g. the Gaslighter theatre in Campbell back in the '80's), which is a lot of fun -- translating dramatic dialog into musical themes.
The funny thing is how artificial the harmonic language we think of as natural is. The urge our ears feel to resolve along the cycle of 5ths evolved over centuries, and only seems natural because we grew up hearing music that spoke in it.
Nominally, it's based on the overtone series, but the actual scale we use is based on exponents of the twelfth root of two. A chromatic scale is defined mathematically as the frequencies:
F * 2^(1/12); F * 2^(2/12); F * 2^(3/12)...
Whereas the overtones are simply multiples
F 2F 3F 4F
One is rational integers, the other irrational exponents.
And when you look at how neatly the key signatures and the cycle of 5ths fit together, it's quite amazing
I heard once (from my analytic geometry teacher) that Chopin objected to people's emotional reaction to some of his pieces. The semantic world that he lived in, of advanced harmonic modulation, didn't entirely connect with the emotional content he was conveying.
Chances (Score:2, Funny)
Apparently, the probability of the word 'sausage' appearing was still pretty good.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
The Greeks (Score:5, Interesting)
'Mousike' was the art of the 'mousai', Muses. 'Mousa' could be a common noun as well as a goddess, meaning "metrical speech". The word is a derivative of 'mna-', "to remember out loud" - same root as "mental" and "memory", which we get from Latin cognates.
You find a similar thing in Vedic Sanskrit. 'Sangita' means "song-and-movement"; it might include instrumental accompaniment, but purely instrumental music was something altogether. Many Greek musical terms also implicitly include the element of dance: Classical Greeks would have found a 'khoros', "chorus" that didn't move to be a contradiction in terms.
In addition to Zanette's work on music and language, there's also some interesting work being done on language and movement (e.g. George Lakoff). Hooking all of these together and getting a picture of how music, cognition and motor function work together is going to be very interesting.
Basic math wins! (Score:4, Interesting)
But looking over the linked study, it's actually quite an elegant look at European and American music. It's neat that the frequency of frequencies (har har) in song parallels the frequency of words in novels. That doesn't mean that "Zipf music" inherently speaks to its listeners, just that people are attracted to this kind of basic math in the world. It's like finding a Golden Ratio -- pretty frickin' cool.
I wish I could see which notes were which on the diagrams. My suspicion is that the relative uses of each note corresponds to the mathematical relationship of the frequency to the tonic. So if x is the tonic, 2x /
Atonal music intentionally avoids emphasizing the mathematically strong relationships, liberating the composer from maintaining that pesky context to a tonic. So it makes sense that Zipf's law won't apply. But before we conclude that people dislike atonal music because it deviates from Zipf, we must answer whether we might also dislike it because we have been indoctrinated into tonality at an early age. And that's where cross-cultural studies are most valuable.
Why did I leave academia to work on websites? This stuff is fun!
rouftop
Fractal Math (Score:5, Informative)
an example (Score:2)
also reveals a key difference between tonal compositions, which are written in a particular key
What the study really says (Score:5, Insightful)
Apart from being a fun mathematical excercise, the only vaguely interesting thing this study says in its current form, is that there is a certain similarity between the spoken word, Bach, Debussy and Mozart on one hand, and Schoenberg on the other hand. However, not even this is particularly interesting, as Schoenberg explicitly tried to avoid just this kind of pattern. Had it been done with Stockhausen, Berio or (at least some of the early) Penderecki pieces, it would be more interesting.
Now it's just fun. No harm in that.
Simplistic (Score:3, Insightful)
There isn't also just atonal and tonal, music from other parts of the world surely "speaks" to people from other countries, otherwise we'd have all ended up with the chromatic Western system today.
Jazz musicians know this... (Score:5, Interesting)
I've tried this several times while sitting at the keys. The same part of my brain that strings together sentences is busy creating musical phrases -- it stubbornly refuses to multitask.
That this relation exists has been known to jazzists for some time: pianist Bill Evans is revered for his 'conversational' improv style. A master of tone color, Bill could say something humorous or profound with each cluster of notes.
Spoken voice following scales (Score:3, Informative)
Solresol was a real music language (Score:5, Interesting)
More info on Solresol [ptialaska.net]
Z
So what does Larry Wall have to say on this? (Score:3, Interesting)
Having had a quick RTFA, it's clear that there's plenty of substance in this research. On the other hand, I'm a perl geek, and I wanna hear what Larry has to say on the subject! He is *the* man where languages and linguistics are concerned after all, and there's probably More Than One Way To Do It In Music!
Language abstract vs. unambiguous (Score:3, Interesting)
IMO, one of the big downfalls of language (English, anyway) is that it is much too easy to be imprecise and ambiguous. Even legal text which strives to be precise can be interpreted in different ways. This is a huge problem because years down the road after text is written and meant to capture a certain meaning, it can be re-interpreted years later to mean something else.
Is this a problem with every language? It seems like more of a problem these days, maybe just because I am noticing it more, but what can be done? Better education? English 2.0?
Not really new (Score:3, Informative)
Naive in various respects (Score:3, Informative)
Computational Linguistics (Score:3, Informative)
void CShameless:Plug()
{
If you're running OS X, check out theConcept [mesadynamics.com] for an example of statistical language processing in action.
}
This just in from Stravinsky... (Score:3, Interesting)
"Give them a jig and tale of bawdry, else they sleep." [William Shakespeare on his audience...]
Haven't any of you geeks heard of Douglas Adams (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:linking music and language-not exactly a new id (Score:2)