The Hills Are Alive With the Sounds of Language...wait Huh?

In the first of two application essays for this course, I reflected upon my experiences in speaking Yoruba and its influences on how I thought.

“Yoruba is a very pitch oriented language and to me the beauty of it is just
that--it's like music, where every note fits. When I speak Yoruba I find it easy
to express myself aesthetically, something that I'm not always capable of doing
in English. It has shaped me as a person because I like to see the beauty in
everything. When I say "beauty", I mean both things that are appealing and
unappealing to the eye. In Yoruba, things are so named to establish the sense of
"beauty" in an object; whether it is trash or rose, they are bestowed names that
fit uniquely in their own "beauty".”

In retrospect after reading Music and Language Are Processed by the Same Brain Systems, perhaps my classification of Yoruba as a musical language, both in tone and with each word representing a note equivalent (a word fittingly given to an object), was misguided. I was correct to state that Yoruba is pitch oriented as there are a whooping 21 vowel sounds; however perhaps my recognition of language and music has much more to do with the findings of this study.

According to researchers at the Georgetown University Medical Center, in both memory systems (one in the temporal lobes and the other in the frontal lobes) we learn to recognize “…words and meanings in language and familiar melodies in music” in the former and in the latter we “…unconsciously learn and use the rules that underlie both language and music, such as the rules of syntax in sentences, and the rules of harmony in music.” They tested subjects to see their reactions to common songs (i.e. Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star) and their in-key variants (different octave) and off-key deviants (disharmonious). The brain wave patterns that they recorded were the same as those discovered for previously studied brain patterns for language memory.

Another article from UC-Irvine discusses the affects of Mandarin on perfect pitch. In Mandarin there are 16 vowel sounds (correct me if I’ve misinterpreted this) with just the slightest pitch producing a different word with a totally different definition. This has helped boost the amount of Chinese students with perfect pitch and goes a step further linking language and music.

So in my case, perhaps I’ve acquired “perfect pitch” of the Yoruba language. This may sound slightly absurd to some readers, but this seems to be a perfectly logical explanation as to why I need to use certain words and why certain words sound significantly better when spoken in Yoruba rather than in English. Ironically, in the Yoruba culture there is a drum called the gangan otherwise known as the talking drum. Today, the gangan is a ceremonial drum used to communicate complex messages to the listener(s) through its changing pitch music (it used to be a common place communication device). It is obvious to me that the Yoruba language has always and is meant to be identified with music.

So yes, I was misguided in my understanding of why Yoruba and music seem interchangeable to me—why words in English don’t create the same musical symphony that words in Yoruba do. And it’s amazing because I’ve never delved so deeply into why I’ve always seen Yoruba and music in this way. This new understanding of myself has left me euphoric and unable to stop smiling.

~1~