{"id":21619,"date":"2024-02-02T21:15:33","date_gmt":"2024-02-02T21:15:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/160-news\/?p=21619"},"modified":"2026-03-13T20:41:44","modified_gmt":"2026-03-13T20:41:44","slug":"language-and-music","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/2024\/02\/language-and-music\/","title":{"rendered":"Language and Music"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Joe Linstroth<\/strong><\/p>\n

Language and music are inextricably linked. Both rely on sounds or signs and culturally specific practices, and both are used to communicate and convey social meaning.<\/p>\n

Language and music also morph in complex ways when they interact with each other. How is music interpreted in sign languages, for example? What happens to hip-hop when it\u2019s created in different languages?<\/p>\n

These are just some of the questions Dr. Morgan Sleeper \u201911, a professor of linguistics, and his students explore in his class \u201cLanguage and Music.\u201d<\/p>\n

In what key ways are language and music connected? <\/strong><\/p>\n

In class, we look at this question in four different ways. One is the idea of \u201cmusic in language,\u201d or the musical elements that we find in language\u2014things like pitch, rhythm, cadence, and melody.<\/p>\n

Another area is \u201cmusic as language.\u201d What does it mean to say music and what does it mean to say language? In some ways that\u2019s obvious. If you\u2019re having a conversation in your kitchen, maybe that\u2019s language, and if you\u2019re on stage performing at a concert, maybe that\u2019s music. But we have a lot of things that are in between. What happens if you are walking down the road singing and talking to yourself?<\/p>\n

We also look at the confluence of what we talk about as \u201clanguage about music.\u201d How do people talk about music in an evaluative sense, but also how do people teach music, interact with music, and create their identities when talking about music?<\/p>\n

The area we spend the most class time on is the idea of \u201clanguage in music.\u201d What does music change about language, and vice-versa, when they interact? If we\u2019re speaking a language versus singing it, how might it change?<\/p>\n

How do music and sign languages interact? <\/strong><\/p>\n

First, there is a misconception that all people who are deaf are not interested in music. Many people who are deaf can hear aural music in a lot of ways. But when music interacts with sign languages, it really blows up what we think of as multimodality in terms of language and music.<\/p>\n

Music is very multimodal in general. If you\u2019re listening to music, there\u2019s more than just the audio. You\u2019re at a concert, you\u2019re moving around, you\u2019re hearing things, but you\u2019re also seeing things and feeling things. You\u2019re pulling up memories and associations you have with this music. It\u2019s an experience that is about much more than sound. When you get into the idea of music and sign languages, it\u2019s adding that additional modality of visual language on top of that.<\/p>\n

One example is \u201csong translations,\u201d where people create videos of themselves translating a popular song into a sign language. Sometimes these use the original audio as a backing track but performed with the sign language. This opens up the possibility of creative mismatches between things like rhythm across these two modes, in the sense that you can have one rhythm in the aural music in the background, while the rhythm of the sign translation could be in a different meter. They might then match up at interesting points for emotional effect, for example. You\u2019re able to experience music in two different ways at once, auditorily and also visually.<\/p>\n

How does hip-hop vary when it\u2019s in different languages?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Hip-hop is a great example because there is a sense of connection across what is sometimes called the \u201cglobal hip-hop nation,\u201d but a key tenet of hip-hop is to be connected to a local place. One of the ways people do that is through language. People can creatively manipulate how they use language within hip-hop to not just talk about place, but really demonstrate a connection to place through their linguistic choices. In Qu\u00e9bec, for instance, there\u2019s a really strong mainstream ideology of monolingual Frenchness, or that French and English are the languages of Qu\u00e9bec. But a lot of Qu\u00e9bec hip-hop actually brings in languages from other immigrant communities that are there as well, so you\u2019ll have hiphop that uses different varieties of French, different varieties of English, plus languages like Haitian Creole and Spanish, all codeswitched together in the same song, and the idea is that by performing this linguistic reality that people see in their daily lives in Qu\u00e9bec, they\u2019re pushing back against that mainstream ideology that Qu\u00e9bec is for French- or English-speakers.<\/p>\n

Hip-hop can change structurally based on the language too. One thing that we often associate with hip-hop is the idea of flow and rhyme structures being really important, but what that looks like across languages can be very different. Rhyming in Japanese hip-hop, for example, is not always organized around syllable structure. It\u2019s often based around something called moraic structure, or moras. A word like \u201cNippon,\u201d for example, which is \u201cJapan\u201d in Japanese, would be two syllables, but it\u2019s four moras: \u201cni\u201d \u201cp\u201d \u201cpo\u201d \u201cn,\u201d and that plays into how people rhyme and create hip-hop in the Japanese language.<\/p>\n

How has your experience at Mac as an undergraduate informed your approach to teaching? <\/strong><\/p>\n

It has informed everything I do. One of the biggest things is that the genuine openness to interdisciplinary work at Mac as an undergrad has really shaped everything about my trajectory through linguistics. I was always encouraged by faculty to see connections between classes and the things I was interested in. That\u2019s what led me to explore language and music together. I was taking linguistics classes, I was taking ethnomusicology classes, and I was excited about the synergies I was seeing and the opportunities to connect to them. The kind of encouragement I got from faculty here is not something that happens everywhere, at an undergrad or graduate level. Having the chance to combine my interests while at Mac is what got me here, and I try to pull that interdisciplinary thinking into everything I do in the classroom.<\/p>\n

Joe Linstroth is director of media relations at Macalester.<\/em><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Professor Morgan Sleeper\u2019s course, students learn how language and music intersect to communicate and convey social meaning.<\/p>","protected":false},"author":881,"featured_media":21623,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[27],"class_list":["post-21619","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-alumni","tag-linguistics"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"fields":{"article_type":false,"flickr_photoset_id":"","youtube_id":"","square_thumbnail":false,"press_photos":false,"story_title":"","story_caption":"","rotations":false,"maps":false,"marker_title":"","marker_text":"","geographic_location":false,"feature_embed":"","custom_link_url":"","news_icon_name":"","image_options":false,"main_feature_story":"","custom_image":false,"custom_feature_title":"","custom_feature_caption":"","custom_markup":"","custom_markup_link":"","custom_markup_title":"","custom_markup_caption":"","byline":"","post_thumbnail_style":"default","press_downloads":false},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21619","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/881"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21619"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21619\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21621,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21619\/revisions\/21621"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21623"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21619"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21619"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.macalester.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21619"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}