Monday, July 9, 2012

Language's Effect on Music Structure

I've been thinking about how the number of syllables in essential words determines the structure of music. Thinking about not whether any particular thought could be expressed but whether there's room for any thought to be expressed in relation to a given number of syllables.

Pronouns tend towards one syllable, as do articles. So do articles. This means if you want to write a song with two syllable words, you can't use pronouns like him, her, or them. And you can't even use the words 'the, an, a,'. As far as prepositions, here's a list so you can see for your self: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_prepositions. It's unfortunate that all the two word and three word prepositions don't work either because they all end with one syllable words.

I wonder what language or languages might have two syllable pronouns and articles to allow for these sorts of combinations. I'll have to look into it.