Music—a universal language or a romanticized hobby?

Music is everywhere. It’s a very large part of our lives, whether we realize it or not. We listen to the car radio on our way to work, some of us enjoy the privelage of listening while we work, and some of us even make it ourselves, by humming or singing to ourselves. We might not even realize that we’re doing it. It can put a person in a good mood, maintain that mood, or even communicate it to other people.

It is on that last point that we will focus now: communication through music. It seems to be such an integrated part of life, no matter who or where we are, that some even consider it a universal language. Is that really the truth, or are we simply romanticizing something we enjoy so completely?

Students of language always find themselves learning of semiotics, the study of signs.

Semiotics has three divisions:

semantics - the meaning;

pragmatics - the use;

and syntactics - the rules of relationships between the signs.

Think of spoken language as the use of vocal signs. It is an intensely complex system of communication, which we make constant use of. If we try to imagine spoken language with any part of semiotics missing, we find that communication becomes impossible. Music, however, is the exception.

In music, no musical note has meaning. Any meaning assigned to a single note in one song is forgotten in the next. The way the notes are used sometimes seems to imply some sort of meaning, and the combinations of notes, or the ascending or descending tones, may by their relationship convey what we perceive as emotional meaning. Millions of songs involve words, but many of them convey the basic emotional tone even without an understanding of the language in which they are sung.

Semantics can become completely unimportant. How many people, upon listening to Brittany Spears’ Baby one more time could probably tell that something torrid is being depicted, even without listening to the lyrics? A more important question is, did anyone listen to them in the first place? Probably not. How else would she have been able to release Oops, I did it again? Virtually no one noticed that it was exactly the same song, but with different words. When approached for comment, Ms. Spears giggled and played with her hair. Her manager said something intelligent, but the effect was already ruined.

But is this really the extent to which we care about lyrics?

AC/DC guitarist, Malcolm Young, says yes. “We haven’t written a coherent lyric in 30 years. We tried to at first, but then we’d play at concerts when we were absolutely drained from the amount of practice it takes just to remember who sung what, and when.

“Then one day in 1973, our original lead singer, Dave Evans, was too wasted to take the stage. We were panicking, wondering what we would do, but we were in a hurry, so we grabbed our chauffeur, Bon Scott, dressed him in something from my dirty laundry, and hoped no one would notice. He didn’t know any of the words, so we were afraid we’d get lynched before the end of it, but I guess our fans were just too stoned to care. It was scary at the time, but now we look back on it and laugh.

“So for the next four years, those two would switch places for the concerts, and it was just really fun for a while. Then Dave left, and we brought in Cliff Williams. The jig was almost up when we toured in New Mexico, where they love to bull-(deleted) about conspiracies, and one of our fans started yelling, “That’s not Dave, it’s not Dave.” We were a little nervous there for a minute, but then Phil Rudd pointed at the sky and started yelling, “Aliens,” and while they were distracted, we got off-stage. There were no encores.

“When Bon died in 1980, we were pretty bummed, but we wanted to keep playing, so we brought in Brian Johnson and made him breathe helium until his voice was similar to Bon’s. I think we’ve written maybe 50 words since then.”

Drummer Phil Rudd left the band in 1982, to be replaced by Simon Wright. This made several university music scholars begin to wonder where the important part of the music was coming from, if not the drums or the vocals. Was it in the guitar? Was it in the fans? Was there some deeper element they were missing? And if no one else cared, why should they? Several researchers attended a 1984 AC/DC concert, to try to determine the answer. It has never been determined exactly what they took, but they haven’t come down yet. One of them was pressed for a report, but what he wrote would eventually hit the airwaves as the Macarena. To avoid getting expelled, he told his professor it was Spanish. He was expelled anyway, and Spain’s GNP tripled. When questioned later in a faculty meeting, the professor said only, “He didn’t bring enough for the rest of the class.”

The unimportance of what is sung today provides stark contrast to the origins of communication, according to some. Leonard Bernstein suggests that musical tones were the bases of all verbal communication, that the first vocal messages were sung, and that complex, articulated languages are descendent of that. Was the universal quality lost somewhere along the line? Was it shed like a tadpole’s tail? Is musical tone no longer a universal method of communication among men? We took this question to the streets. All 49 women questioned said no, that intonations in the voice were still common tools of communication. Of the 54 men we asked, 38 became defensive, insisting that, really, there was no tone, while the other 16 were distracted by the engine noise of passing vehicles.

So what happened? Are men as a gender tone-deaf? Judging from N-Sync, yes. Judging from the Backstreet Boys, no. We all start out with a certain appreciation of tonal communication. When a baby is happy, he will coo. He will change his tone if he wants something, or if he’s in distress. Yet how many parents struggle to figure out what their child might be saying?

One popular theory suggests that it is a primal respect issue. In societal groups of wild animals, such as gorillas and lions, the respected leader commands respect with physical violence and a loud, commanding voice. Whereas high-pitched sounds have proven to aid in healing, low rumbling sounds have proven equally effective in destructive applications—hence, a powerful roar is to be respected. This theory suggests that males of the human species shed their appreciation of tone as a result of an instinctive preoccupation with power. This may be why the males that make up 83% of the AC/DC fan-base attend the concerts; the high-pitched sound of the vocals makes them feel more powerful than the lead singer, who, by receiving so much attention from cheering fans, is in an artificial position of Alpha Male. Drugs and alcohol may also be large factors.

The development of articulated language is a more complex form of communication, but it isn’t necessarily better, or more inclusive. With an increased vocabulary of words, an understanding of slight musical communications may be lost. Articulated language, therefore, is the middle ground. Not everyone remembers this, when attempting to communicate on this level. This is why, when men hear that everything is fine, they believe it.