Comparison

The Identity of the
Compositional
Formative Forces in
Music and Speech

The Imperfect Form of
Speech Today

Limits of the Ability
of Differentiation
in Speech

Poverty of Feeling in
the Spoken Word

Comprehending
Speech through
Feeling

Status Quo

"The language of music is the beginning and the end of the language of words."

Richard Wagner

Whatever can be expressed in words can be communicated much shorter and more to the point through the medium of music because, as different from the common language of today, music has the potential to integrate space and time, and is therefore able to describe and explain the world of the infinite even to the philosophically uneducated music lover.

The inner, compositional, formative forces of music are available to speech as well. Today, however, because the means of outer linguistic articulation are much less cultivated than the means of musical performance, the physiology of the larynx is unable to adequately carry the thought into the acoustic field.

Moreover, today's language is not perfect in that content and form are not integrated in a natural manner. Due to articulatory simplifications its emphasis is therefore on semantics.
The extent of this shift is shown by the existence of words which sound quite differently in different languages but which mean one and the same thing. So, the structure of a word has hardly any relation to its content, its meaning anymore.

When listening to speech we predominantly pay attention to its meaning and not to its structure; therefore it can furthermore be found that, due to our lack of practice in structural hearing, the phonetic structure of speech has, for our present intellectual ability to differentiate, an unproportionately high flow of information which can not be mastered so quickly.

Today, therefore, we comprehend the spoken word predominantly through the understanding – and even then, only with a very restricted, rather categorical meaning – and almost not at all through the feeling.
And yet, every word we speak is also full of emotional content which is related to our inner desires, our inner will, and our very personal motivations, and which we lay into our words to give them greater emphasis to achieve specific ends.

In general. however, the ability to differentiate on the level of our feeling is only little developed, and only very few people are able to successfully apply it in the field of speech.
So, today one is used to speak mostly about things which do not carry emotional contents of their own, e.g. technical equipment, technical processes – the entire sphere of material life.

That is why an emotional comprehension of the colloquial language is almost not worthwhile today, and therefore man has also not learned to articulate and to communicate from the level of feeling in a differentiated language.

"There are moments when I find that language is still
nothing at all."

Beethoven

 

©  Micro Music Laboratories  2001