Society for Music Theory

Essay: Two Ways in Which Music Relates to the World

Author(s): FRED LERDAHL
Source: Music Theory Spectrum , Vol. 25, No. 2 (Fall 2003), pp. 367-373
Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for Music Theory
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/mts.2003.25.2.367

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679-125.MTS.Lerdahl_pp367-374 8/28/03 2:25 PM Page 367
two ways in which music relates to the world
Essay:
Two Ways in Which Music Relates
to the World
fred lerdahl
Of all the arts, music possesses the most technical vocabu-
lary. This state of affairs gives music theorists the ability to
speak and write about music with enviable precision, but it
also isolates us. Technical training in music theory is a spe-
cialized endeavor. Nonmusicians, and even musicians who
are not theoretically inclined, do not easily understand us.
From our isolation and their incomprehension comes the
tendency to regard music as existing in a bubble, unrelated to
anything else in the world. This view is surely mistaken.
Here, I shall discuss two respects in which music relates to
the world beyond itself: its common origin and shared struc-
tures with language, and its projection of intuitions of ten-
sion, attraction, and agency through the internalization of
motion. Both aspects are fundamental to musical emotion.
Music exists in complex form only in the human species,
and it appears in all human societies. How did it arise? Early
ethnomusicologists were concerned with this question, but
in recent decades the issue has largely been neglected. A sign
of recent reengagement is a rather speculative book, The
Origins of Music, in which biologists, paleontologists, evo-
lutionary psychologists, and anthropologists propose that
music-making conferred an evolutionary advantage upon our
distant ancestors.1 The hypothesized causes for the musical
capacity include Darwinian sexual selection, synchronized
group behavior, social bonding during grooming, mother-
1 Wallin, et al., 2001.
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367
infant interplay, and expressive gestural communication.
These causes are not mutually exclusive.
One suggestive idea in this volume, by Steven Brown, is
that music first emerged together with language in a “musi-
language” that eventually split into the two modalities that
we recognize today. The notion that music and language
have the same source goes back at least to Jean-Jacques
Rousseau, who wrote:
With the first voices came the first articulations or sounds formed ac-
cording to the respective passions that dictated them . . . Thus verse,
singing, and speech have a common origin. The first discourses were
the first songs. The periodic recurrences and measures of rhythm, the
melodious modulations of accents, gave birth to poetry and music along
with language.2
Brown’s evolutionary argument is very general, but it can
be supported by two lines of contemporary evidence. The
first comes from the brain sciences. The neuropsychologist
Isabelle Peretz has reached some telling conclusions based
on patterns of behavioral deficits in patients with brain
lesions.3 First, musical processing divides into two broad
components, rhythm and pitch. Second, musical and linguis-
tic processing share certain deficits but not others. On one
hand, rhythmic processing takes place in the same areas of
the brain for both language and music. On the other, lexical
retrieval and syntax in language and pitch processing in
music are activated in different areas of the brain. Contour
recognition appears to take place in a different brain area
than interval recognition and to precede it in processing, so
that tone-deaf people are usually able to speak with normal
contour but contour-deaf people are necessarily tone-deaf.
These conclusions are supported in part by new imaging
techniques that track local brain activation.
The second line of evidence comes from theoretical ac-
counts of linguistic and musical cognitive capacities. The
2 Rousseau [1760] 1966, 50.
3 Peretz 1993 and Patel & Peretz 1997.
679-125.MTS.Lerdahl_pp367-374 8/28/03 2:25 PM Page 368
368 music theory spectrum 25 (2003)
linguistic capacity has three broad components: semantics,
syntax, and phonology. Music does not, except peripherally,
have semantics in a linguistic sense, which includes lexical
items as well as concepts such as reference and entailment.
Nor does music have a specifically linguistic syntax, which
includes parts of speech, labeled phrase structures, negation,
anaphora, and so forth. Rather, the linguistic component
that most resembles music is phonology, which, like music,
concerns the organization of sound in time. The sounds of
sentences break up into units of phrases and words; these
units decompose into patterns of stressed and unstressed
sounds and of long and short sounds, and they form rising
and falling contours.
All of these phonological features have musical counter-
parts. In a recent article I develop these parallels through a
treatment of the sounds of a short poem, “Nothing Gold
Can Stay” by Robert Frost, entirely as if they were musical
sounds, ignoring their meaning and syntax.4 The sounds of
the poem are put through the grouping, metrical, and reduc-
tional components of Lerdahl & Jackendoff 1983 (hereafter
GTTM), and through a newly devised method for the deri-
vation of contour. The analytic procedure relies on aspects of
generative phonological theory, specifically the prosodic hi-
erarchy, stress theory, and contour theory.5 Briefly, the
prosodic hierarchy describes the grouping of speech sounds
into the levels of the syllable, word or clitic group, phonolog-
ical phrase, intonational phrase, and utterance. The stress
theory uses a notation similar to GTTM’s metrical grid and
represents hierarchical patterns of syllabic stress. Stresses are
assigned cyclically over the prosodic groupings.
After these structures are established, the model assigns
metrical structure by finding the optimal match between a
permissible metrical grid and the stress pattern, essentially as
4 Lerdahl 2001a.
5 For prosodic hierarchy, see Hayes 1989; for stress theory, Liberman &
Prince 1977; and for countour theory, Pierrehumbert 1980 and Ladd
1996.
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in the musical case. Syllables are placed not only to match
stress and grid but also to maximize, through relative dis-
tances between attack points, the perceptual projection of
the constituents of the prosodic hierarchy. In this way long
and short durations are assigned to syllables. It may be ob-
jected that language and even metered poetry are not spoken
with periodicity between metrical accents. However, limer-
icks and many short verses are recited with great metrical
regularity,6 and music is never played by human performers
with complete isochrony.7 The difference is one of degree.
Periodic meter is an idealized mental construct for both
music and poetry.
The derivation of contour follows largely from the stress
grid, since the perception of relative stress is primarily a re-
sult of relative pitch height, not of intensity, as one might
suppose.8 Following intonational theory and data,9 which
establish focal pitches usually near the onset of syllables even
though pitch height continuously modulates, the model
posits four levels of tone height, with glides assumed be-
tween levels. In other languages the treatment of pitch
height might vary. Within the four-level framework, pitch
height is assigned via the stress grid from global to local
levels, guided by a few paradigmatic shapes.10
The addition of contour to the metrical and durational
assignments yields the normative realization of the poem in
musical notation shown in Example 1. Contained within
this seemingly transparent notation are the structures of the
prosodic hierarchy, phonological stress, the metrical grid,
duration, and pitch height.11
6 Oehrle 1989.
7 Gabrielsson 1999.
8 Handel 1989.
9 Reviewed in Ladd 1996.
10 This method bears comparison to the pitch-contour tradition in music
theory, in particular the contour reduction algorithm in Morris 1993.
11 The phonologist William Idsardi recently apprised me of Frost’s read-
ing of this poem, recorded in Paschen and Mosby 2001. Frost’s rendi-
tion is extremely close to that represented in Example 1.
679-125.MTS.Lerdahl_pp367-374 8/28/03 2:25 PM Page 369

two ways in which music relates to the world 369

Ł Ł ý  Ł Ł Ł ¹ ¹ Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł ý
2

¹ ¹ Ł Ł Ł Ł ¹ ¹ Ł Ł Ł Ł
4

⁄Ł Ł Ł Ł
2 2
Ł Łý
Na-ture’s first green is gold, Her hard- est hue to hold. Her ear- ly leaf’s a flow- er; But on- ly so an hour.

        
⁄ ¼ ý ¹ ¹ Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł ý ¹ ¹ Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł ý ¹ ¹ Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł ý ¼ ý Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł ý ¼ ý
Then leaf sub-sides to leaf. So E- den sank to grief. So dawn goes down to day. Noth-ing gold can stay.

example 1. Metrical, durational, and contour realization of “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” by Robert Frost.

From a musical perspective there is another step to take.
Traditional poetic analysis treats verbal recurrences as simple
rhyming patterns: aabb, abab, and so forth. Music theory, in
contrast, has a highly developed approach to recurrence in
the form of prolongational structure. As in my theory of
timbral prolongations,12 prosodic prolongational structure is
derived from global to local time-span reductional levels of
syllabic prominence. Example 2 illustrates this for the first
couplet. Noteheads signify relative structural importance. In
an adaptation of GTTM’s threefold classification, dashed
slurs represent the strong prolongation of rhyme, dotted slurs
the weak prolongation of alliteration or assonance, and solid
slurs the progression of nonrepetition. The graph shows not
isolated instances of alliteration and rhyme, as in standard
poetic analysis, but the richer relationship of partial repeti-
tions nested within rhymes—“green” is to “gold” as “hue” is
to “hold.” Note that it is timbral similarity rather than pitch
that is connected prolongationally, for “gold” is in the highest
pitch category while “hold” is in the lowest. This approach
can be extended to the poem as a whole.
Incidentally, text setting is a rich source of evidence for
the interface between music and poetry.13 The present ap-
12 Lerdahl 1987.
13 Ruwet 1972, Jackendoff 1989, Halle & Lerdahl 1994, and Hayes &
Kaun 1996.
proach can contribute in turn to the study of text setting. It
should also be remarked that this treatment extends to the
analysis of nonpoetic speech, with the proviso that in ordi-
nary speech there is little regularity in phonological stress
and syllabic repetition, so that its metrical and prolonga-
tional structures are attenuated.
To summarize the preceding, music and the the sounds of
language share more organization than has commonly been
recognized. The subcomponents of this organization corre-
spond to the pattern of neuropsychological evidence men-
tioned earlier. Example 3 gives the hypothesized overall pic-
ture: those brain modules that process rhythm, contour, and
timbral relationships are the same in music and language,
while those that process purely pitch-intervallic structures
and purely linguistic syntax and semantics occupy different
parts of the brain. The convergence between cognitive the-
ory and neuroscientific evidence calls for further investigation.
The most plausible explanation for this convergence is
that music and language share the same evolutionary roots,
in the form of pre-musical and pre-linguistic communicative
and expressive auditory gestures involving shapes of group-
ing, stress, duration, contour, and timbre. We still communi-
cate with infants and higher mammals in this manner. These
elementary shapes appear to lie at the basis of expressive
utterance in language and of musical expression. With evo-
lution came specialization. Music and language diverged in

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370 music theory spectrum 25 (2003)

  ð 
⁄ Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł Ł
 
Na- ture’s first green is gold Her hard- est hue to hold

example 2. Prolongational structure of the first couplet of “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” by Robert Frost.

exclusively musical structures common structures exclusively linguistic structures

pitches & intervals durational patterns syntactic categories & relations
scales grouping (prosodic hierarchy) word meaning (lexicon)
harmony & counterpoint stress (contextual salience) semantic structures (reference, truth
tonality metrical grids conditions . . .)
pitch prolongations contour phonological distinctive features
tonal tension & attraction timbral prolongations (etc.)

example 3. Hypothesized brain organization of musical and linguistic structures.

their most characteristic features: pitch organization in
music, and word and sentence meaning in language. Poetry
straddles this evolutionary divergence by projecting, through
the addition to ordinary speech of metrical and timbral pat-
terning, its common heritage with music.
Let us now consider a second way in which music relates
to the world beyond itself. Drawing on philosophical and
linguistic work by Lakoff & Johnson (1980), Jackendoff
(1982), and others, the cognitive scientist Steven Pinker
writes:
Location in space is one of the two fundamental metaphors in language
. . . The other is force, agency, and causation . . . Many cognitive scien-
tists have concluded from their research that a handful of concepts
about places, paths, motions, agency, and causation underlie the literal
or figurative meanings of tens of thousands of words and constructions,
not only in English but in every other language that has been studied
. . . These concepts and relations appear to be the vocabulary and syntax
of mentalese, the language of thought.14
I have reached a similar conclusion about music from a
different line of reasoning. In the early 1980s, it was estab-
lished empirically that music listeners of varied training and
background make essentially identical judgments about per-
ceived distances of pitches, chords, and regions from a given
tonic.15 This striking discovery motivated me both to seek a
theoretical explanation for regular patterns in the data and to
develop a model that would quantify the qualitatively stated
stability conditions in GTTM’s conception of prolonga-
tional analysis. This research agenda culminated in Tonal
Pitch Space,16 which presents an algebraic model of the per-
ceived distances of pitches, chords, and regions from one an-
other. These distances are mapped onto multidimensional
geometries that have precedent in the music-theoretic litera-
ture. In addition to providing an explanatory framework
for the data, the model is used to trace event locations and
paths at multiple prolongational levels, thereby conveying in

15 Krumhansl 1990.
14 Pinker 1997, 354–5. 16 Lerdahl 2001b.

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679-125.MTS.Lerdahl_pp367-374 8/28/03 2:25 PM Page 371
two ways in which music relates to the world
a specific manner the otherwise vague intuition that listening
to a piece of music is like taking a journey. When allied to
words, pitch-space paths take on a narrative dimension as
well.
The pitch-space theory also enables the prediction of pat-
terns of tension and relaxation as events unfold. Four condi-
tions are needed to make valid predictions. First, there must
be a component that derives and represents hierarchical
event structure, since tension is judged hierarchically more
than sequentially.17 This goal is accomplished by an im-
proved version of GTTM’s prolongational analysis. Second,
there must be a calculation of the perceived distance between
any two chords, something the model does with great accu-
racy. Third, there must be a treatment of surface or sensory
dissonance. Although this topic has been studied extensively
by psychoacousticians, its behavior in musical contexts is
complex, and here the theory settles for an approximate
implementation. Fourth, there must be a model of melodic
and harmonic attractions. The theory succeeds in this goal,
subject to computational fine-tuning from experimental evi-
dence that is only beginning to become available.18 Carol
Krumhansl and I have undertaken an ongoing empirical
study of the predictions of the tension model over a wide
range of diatonic and chromatic music. The correlations be-
tween predictions and data are generally very high, and they
permit detailed and illuminating interpretations about lis-
teners’ responses.19
According to this theoretical and empirical perspective,
then, not only the linguistic but also the musical capacity
employs space and motion in a constitutive way. This em-
ployment is not just cognitive in a disembodied sense but is a
17 This conclusion is sustained by empirical data on hierarchical and se-
quential predictions, as reported in Lerdahl, et al., 2000.
18 See also Larson 2002 and Margulis 2003.
19 A preliminary version of this research appears in Lerdahl and Krum-
hansl 2003. For a historical review of music theories of tonal motion,
tension, and attraction, see Rothfarb 2002.
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371
cause of the visceral sense of the ebb and flow of musical
tension.20
Recall Pinker’s statement: “Location in space is one of the
two fundamental metaphors in language. The other is force,
agency, and causation.” The theory of tonal attraction brings
force into the picture of musical space and motion. Like a
spaceship moving among the moons of Jupiter, a melody or
chord progression moves in a certain direction but is affected
in its velocity and direction by the relative gravitational or
attractive force of other pitches and chords. A neighboring
ornament may have little effect on its motion, but a tonic has
considerable mass and may bring the tonal spaceship to rest.
But what of agency and causation? Pinker refers to a clas-
sic experiment by Heider & Simmel (1944), in which they
made a cartoon film using three dots that were perceived by
subjects as moving not as inanimate objects but as animate
agents. Pinker writes:
Agents are recognized by their ability to violate intuitive physics by
starting, stopping, swerving, or speeding up without an external nudge,
especially when they persistently approach or avoid some other object.
The agents are thought to have an internal and renewable source of
energy, force, impetus, or oomph, which they use to propel themselves,
usually in the service of a goal.21
Similarly, a melody or chord progression does not simply
follow the inertial path of least resistance. It would be dull
and would quickly come to a stop unless enlivened by mo-
tion away from places that pull it toward rest. Such motion
works against inertia and seems to be caused by an animate
agent. Furthermore, such motion causes an emotional re-
sponse. Echoing Pinker, the neurologist Antonio Damasio
writes:
You can find the basic configurations of emotions in simple organisms,
even in unicellular organism . . . You can do the same thing with a
simple chip moving about on a computer screen. Some jagged fast
movements will appear “angry,” harmonious but explosive jumps will
20 See Brower 2000.
21 Pinker 1997, 322.
679-125.MTS.Lerdahl_pp367-374 8/28/03 2:25 PM Page 372

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