Is music a language?

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I believe it is for many reasons. I'm even currently having a facebook debate about with another band student But I want to see all of your opinions/facts backing up why music is or isn't a language. Happy debating!

I can go to Russia or Paraguay, be given a sheet of music, and harmoniously play along with a roomful of musicians simply based on the language we all understand. Yeah. Music is a language, like math.

I think it was marin marais who said that music expresses what words cannot. music take up where words leave off.

It has vocabulary, syntax, etc. It is used to communicate. It can be understood whether you've had formal training or not. It can even be translated for people who can't hear.

Yes. There's a level of personal interpretation in music that may not translate precisely, but this is really true of formal language as well.

Songs can communicate the same emotion regardless of whether you speak the same language as the singer, so it must be the music doing the communicating.

There's a book - The Singing Neanderthals by Prof. Stephen Mithen - which claims that music was in some ways the forerunner of language. Interesting reading.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKJbziZlogk[/youtube]

music as the language between aliens and earthlings

music involves logic, intervals and proportions, as does math. music is mathematically linguistic. [or so a maths guy told me once a long time ago].

in theory if popularly understood and with a common instrument you could communicate by music alone

however it wouldnt be a very practical language by any means, so whilst it could be employed as such it wouldnt be very practical also as a written language it would need work.

I voted yes. It is a language that can communicate emotion and setting. I also believe bird songs are their ways of communicating to each other. Humans have used it for thousands of years to communicate.