Language and music

In David Crystal's book Language Death, he compares the memory skills of a traditional oral historian/storyteller to that of a musician who can play large works from memory:

Ask them [musicians] how they do it, and they will talk about developing wider perceptions of structural organisation, operating with different kinds of memory simultaneously, and downgrading matters of detail - 'The memory is in the fingers', as concert pianist Iwan Llewellyn Jones put it to me once.

I'm not a fantastic guitarist by any stretch of the imagination, but I recognise the sentiments expressed in the quote.  Even before I learnt a lot of theory, I had an intuitive feel for chord progressions and the like.

I learnt this from examples, and once I had, I found it easier to memorise new songs.

The relevance of this?  Well, what is grammar if it's not "structural organisation"?

When I started thinking about this, it was a bit of a troubling analogy.  Didn't I learn music before I understood the "structural organisation"?  Didn't I learn the "structural organisation" through simply practising the music?  Well yes, yes I did.

So why do I feel I should be studying actively the grammar of a language?  Why should language we any different from music?

I stopped and I thought about it for quite a while.  But the answer was pretty obvious, and once I spotted it I wondered how it could have taken me so long....

....I started playing musical instruments with the help of sheet music.  I played the same handful of tunes round and round and round and round for several weeks.  I simply could not do that with language -- it would drive me round the bend.  Repeat a paragraph over and over and over and over and over?  I think not.  But I could handle it in music, because the tune itself offered some small measure of motivation.  There's an intrinsic difference there.

But wait... doesn't that simply mean that we can tolerate inefficient teaching in music.  Maybe music could be better taught...?

So that Susan Boyle has been back in the press, promoting her new album just in time for the Christmas rush.

I hear she's being quite inspirational too, telling people how all they need to do is work hard and turn up to lots of auditions.  The trouble is, for SuBo it's not just about how good she is.  She's a very talented singer, but she really isn't the "best".  There's a few rough edges and she pronounces some words very oddly.

SuBo's success is down to being... well, not the prettiest picture in the gallery, and standing up and singing well despite getting laughed at by an audience and judging panel who seemed to believe that anyone who isn't naturally gorgeous can't sing.  She is, basically, a novelty act - a one-off.  There are people who have worked harder than her and have as much or more talent than her that remain as unknown as she was only 2 years ago.  This is not through lack of effort, it's just a lack of lucky timing.

This is a pervasive trope in our modern world: "try hard enough and you can be the best!"  It's like the American parent in the old black-and-white films telling the kid that one day he can be president.

But there are over 300 million people in the USA, and there's a presidential election once in every 5 years.  That means in a average lifetime, you'd expect to see about 15 presidents.   So about 0.000005% of the US population will ever be president.  1 in 20,000,000.

The odds for popular singers are a bit better, but you're still relying on a whole lot of luck.

OK, so what's this got to do with language?

Well, have a look at this article from the BBC's From our own Correspondent.  French bands are increasingly singing in English.  His article focuses on the angle of choice, freedom and cool, and skips past the question of success, but I find it hard to imagine that an ambitious young French singer doesn't have at least half an eye on the international success of Daft Punk.  But this is new only because we're talking about France.  If we step slowly backwards in time, we can see the Latin American stars (Shakira and Ricky Martin), Dutch electronic dance music (remember the Vengaboys anyone?) and on back through to Sweden where acts like Roxette followed on from cheesetastic Abba.

The number of international success stories is low, and it's a fair assumption that for every break out artist there's a hundred or more that didn't make it, and who're doing the same thing -- which means singing in English.

The desire to be the best, the biggest, the worldwide hit is discouraging people from being happy with being good locally, and it's taking people away from their own languages.

Take a look at the show Rapal on BBC Radio nan Gaidheal and BBC Alba.  Over the years they've supported various bands from within the Gaelic community, but for the most part these bands sing exclusively in English.  They're chasing the bigger audiences, but sadly the odds are stacked against them.  It's a shame to see talented young people waste their time chasing the unobtainable rather than making a genuine impact in their own small part of the world.

Passive vs Active

I read an interesting article on Wired.com recently, relating to a paper in the Journal of Neuroscience.  The study looked at a small set of musical skills.  Common wisdom is that you can only learn music by performing it, which is analogous to learning language by production.  Previous studies support this, and prove that you can't learn to play music just by listening, which is analogous to language learning by practicing receptive skills.

The study noted that previous research has focussed on an all-or-nothing approach -- all practice or no practice -- and instead looked at the effects on passive perception in addition to practice, and they claim that timed right, it's just as effective to spend 50% of your time listening to what you've just learned.  They are, of course, talking about fairly early learners, as professional level musicians can show remarkable skills in learning and playing new music.

This makes a great deal of sense to me -- I have always said that I can only understand something that I can say (or, in the case of language I've forgotten, could have said previously).  This doesn't mean that I ever would say it, but that it is possible in my internal model of the language.  This, I feel, is analogous to the example of musicians.

A beginner in both fields has a small set of "devices" to employ (specific notes and practised combinations thereof vs specific words and practised combinations of them) and neither is going to be able to directly relate to any material that goes beyond that set.  As the learner develops in both fields, the set of devices grows, and the learner will be able to generalise to all material made up of items within their arsenal of devices.  Thus the musician who masters one style of music will be able to play any piece in that style by ear, because it is a recombination of musical devices he knows, but will not be able to do the same for a piece in a radically different style.  The language learner with high fluency and proficiency in his new language will be able to understand lots of individual sentences that he has never heard before but are composed of language he knows, but if someone says an idiomatic phrase he has never learned, he obviously can't understand it -- are you hip to my jive, man?

If this research proves to hold true for language learning as it does for musical skills, then the language teaching industry is missing a trick by producing materials that students can't understand in their entirety.  Perhaps instead students would be better listening to things that they have just been taught to say, even if they can only say them shakily.  Some lessons in the Pimsleur method do this, repeating at the end of the lesson the dialogue that was used to teach that lesson.  Assimil teaches you from a dialogue, and then asks you to listen to the dialogue again once you've learned it all, without reading any notes, so that you understand it in its entirety. This may be a lazy way to do it, because it doesn't really require true understanding, but many people are happy with it.  It's curious then that neither Teach Yourself nor Colloquial, the two biggest book-shelf brands available in the UK, give the learner any instruction to relisten to each lesson's dialogues at the end of the lesson.  It seems like a pretty quick win -- at present the dialogue is only listened to before the presentation of the associated language points, when the learner will most likely understand almost none of it.

Personally I would like to see the post-learning listening being a new and unheard piece, but built up of the elements used earlier in the lesson.  This is easier said than done, though.  If you start from a situational point of view (Chapter 1: Greetings, Chapter 2: Meet the family etc), then you are going to be recycling the same phrases and it will be an almost identical dialogue to what's been used in the lesson.  If you go from a grammar-led course, on the other hand, it's going to be difficult to find anything interesting to say, and you're likely to end up with something that sounds quite contrived.

It's a difficult one.

(NB.  The Journal of Neuroscience isn't available in my university library, so I've only read the abstract.)