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Comment by kqr | Hacker News Reader

That said, if I remember correctly, there's a more recent thread of research linking tonally and rhythmically complex jazz to benefits similar to learning a second language early.

The idea is that very small humans interpret sufficiently complicated (in the information theoretic sense) music as a language.

Anecdotally, my infant son could be entertained by jazz when few other things worked. He really listened to it.

I don't remember how credible the evidence is and I've lost the references I had. Does anyone know what I'm talking about?

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"The idea is that very small humans interpret sufficiently complicated (in the information theoretic sense) music as a language."

That was my hypothesis as well. I often played "field recordings" (captures of real-life sounds, maybe later composed into something experimental) and all sorts of free-form music to our son when he was very young. He had a keen interest in those "strange sounds" at around age 3; with kindergarten and now school, he has IMO developed a more "mainstream-radio-pop-framed" understanding of music. Stupid radio songs, LOL. If I continue to bother him with weirdo stuff occasionally, I think he'll be good nonetheless, though.

The "everything is language, and everything is music" paradigm has always felt natural to me. That's why I also started to read out loud to our children even when they were inside mommy's belly. Later, I read all sorts of "adult books" to them as infants: the key was not having them understand every word (vocabulary development), but rather having them sense the melodic flow of human language. Be it mother tongue or not. The music of spoken word, so to say.

Music is a language, or rather a type of language. Depending on the culture, it has 5 or 12 symbols (tones), and each musical culture has its grammatical structure: in Western music most sequential 8 symbol arrangements are gibberish, others convey different emotions, most of those sequences don't go well together, some do and so on.

It's a development of the ancient language we use to communicate mood and intent by varying the pitch and rhythm of voice while speaking. Useless to transmit concepts, but excellent to transmit emotions.

In general there's no way to distinguish between: I'm mad (crazy), I'm constipated, I'm angry, babbling (playing random notes), [a sequence of notes played for the disharmony itself], ... there's not sufficient agreement in meaning to be a language.

I think you're incorrect. Even just thinking on the surface about this assertion, it doesn't hold up. Music can communicate a lot, and I think a better musician than me would likely be able to find you appropriate arrangements for all those things you mentioned.

If music is a language, it is certainly one that developed very very differently, by virtue of not being used to communicate ideas but rather emotions. But there's some crazy languages out there, and the first ones that come to mind which can absolutely debunk what you said are these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whistled_language

But, there needs to be "agreement" in the meaning to make it a language of course. So the first four notes of symphony number 5 might not communicate something common to everybody who hears it, but neither does the sound "love" (/lʌv/) universally communicate the emotion of love. (Nor does it even in english; if I tell you "I love this weather", "I love my girlfriend" and "Of course I love walking on lego", that sound communicates extremely different things)

Whistled language is a language, for sure, but it seems a stretch to say it's music. If you're doing that then you may as well just say vocalised languages are music.

Your examples on ambiguity are poor IMO, there's a huge class difference between whether a passage of a symphony conveys linguistic meaning and the relatively small variance of interpretation of "love" for a single one of your examples. Also, we know the difference (in general) between those three uses of "love" (romantic, appreciative, sarcastic) from the context; you do get context in music but it suffers even more from wide variance in interpretation.

Prokofiev's 'Peter and the Wolf' is a great example of musical narrative but the passages portray a generalized emotion rather than language. Is Peter happy in the main theme, or just relaxed, maybe ignorant?

It well be a language depending on how you define language, but the hypothesis I'm talking about rests on the assumption that most (Western) music is repetitive enough and with a small "vocabulary" enough to be uninteresting to newborns, and certainly not heard as a language simply because of the lack of variation. (Some pop music is worse than other types in this regard.)

FWIW, I can attest to 'music as a language' experience - in two different conversational modes.

First is the obvious one: Where the entities conversing is the music and myself. I think most people can relate to this unidirectional experience.

Second, and less observed mode, is when consuming mostly-instrumental type of music. Here the entities 'conversing' have to be inferred, but most often my mind will settle on giving each instrument a personality.

In this mode, I'm merely a bystander listening in on a conversation. I often automatically imagine these instruments talking to each other, and the act of listening is simply an act of interpreting what they are talking.

This would be nothing new to many people reading this, but I know many people who often don't listen to music. Check this short clip if you want to play with this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tf-QV8Z8Pww

Similar experience, but with prog metal.

"If you can listen to prog rock, you are probably smart" -Someone

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