Music and Language. Two things that appear seemingly different. Their origins have been a subject of much debate and research. Did music come from language? Did language come from music? Do they even have anything to do with each other?
As a musician, I find these questions quite interesting. I’ve been playing violin for around 13 years, so connecting music and language together and contemplating how they relate and what might have come first is very fascinating to me. Both Gary Marcus and Anthony Brandt try to tackle this question in their respective works. Reading what each had to say was enlightening because they have contrasting views; nevertheless, both provide solid evidence to back their claims. One one side, there’s Gary Marcus who, in Guitar Zero, states that language is innate, something we have naturally. And then on the other had, Anthony Brandt argues that “spoken language is a special type of music.”
While Gary Marcus did talk about the possibility of language coming from music, he still believed that in the end, music comes from language. Looking at toddlers, one sees how they struggle when learning melodies compared “to the extreme speed at which toddlers naturally pick up language” (Marcus 40). Even children prefer speech over music, which is part of his defense as to why language is more innate. This provides an interesting contrast to Brandt’s argument because as I was reading, I then realized that they have different definitions for what the consider to be music. Marcus seems to take it more literally while Brandt defines it as “a creative play with sound.” Part of why I think they came up with such different conclusions is because of this important difference in how they define music. When Brandt says that language acquisition comes from music, obviously he doesn’t argue that infants start singing before they talk, but he breaks down how they learn language by saying that infants “listen first to sounds of language and only later to its meaning.” It’s those sounds and the discrimination of the sounds of language which is “the most musical aspect of speech.”
Not only did they view whether language came before music or vis versa differently, but the way they looked at how music developed differed as well. Marcus saw the development of music in the human brain as something much more complex than Brandt. To Marcus, music is “something that is learned through extended practice, by people that already have both language and a sophisticated set of tools for acquiring new skills through training and cultural transmission” (Marcus 41). So not only does one need language but they have to be intelligent enough and they need enough practice and training in order to be able to learn new things such as music. Brandt, on the other hand, says he wants to challenge this view that music cognition takes more time to mature than language. He argues that they develop along similar time lines. No special skills required.
At first when I was thinking about which side I agreed with more, I was torn between the two. Eventually, I was personally more persuaded by Brandt’s view that language comes from music. Near the end of the article, when Brandt talked about rehabilitation for strokes, his explanation as to why music helps reacquire language was that maybe that’s because that’s how they learned it in the first place as infants. While he said he still wanted to do more research to back that theory, I still found that idea to be fascinating and it’s what ultimately led me to agree with his findings.
Rice University. "Music underlies language acquisition, theorists propose." ScienceDaily, 18 Sep. 2012. Web. 11 Oct. 2012.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/09/120918185629.htm
Marcus, Gary F. Guitar Zero: The New Musician and the Science of Learning. New York: Penguin, 2012. Print.
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