Music as Language

I'm not going to tell you about the beauty of opera or about how a well-written country song can break your heart just as surely as your freshman year sweetheart did. As I so often do, I'm going to tell you about a dream I had. More specifically, I'm going to tell you about a series of dreams I've been having on and off for the last 20 years.

What makes these dreams unusual is the fact that they're nearly always accompanied by physical symptoms. Although the dreams themselves have nothing to do with my physical body (as in most dreams, I can't see myself), they are frequently accompanied by abdominal pain so severe that I can't move, and often my belly button is full of blood. These dreams are the source of enmity between my navel and myself, and if I could have it surgically removed, I'd do it.

Anyway, here is the story of those dreams:

Since I was 23, I've had the same recurring dream. Well, not really the same - but the theme is the same: music as language.

When the dreams first started, they centered around indistinct forms gathered around me, speaking not to me, but to each other. Their speech was brief, staccato and had nothing like vowels or consonants. It was only "music" in the sense that there were separate tones of varying lengths, but they didn't exactly form a melody the same way that a random collection of words do not necessarily form a coherent sentence. Only one being talked at a time, and the same series of notes in the same pattern could be heard over and over.

Over the years, the music has gotten more complex, and I've realized that the initial noises I heard were the musical equivalent of baby talk, or a grocery list. First, the increased complexity was just the running together of notes, like full sentences instead of individual words and phrases. The next step was multiple notes at once - not really harmony or chords, because the notes didn't always sound pleasant. I realize that this represented layers of meaning: jokes, puns, double entendres. The next step were concerted symphonies. They sounded beautiful and impressive - rhetoric. Musical language meant to pursuade or influence.

I think that what is pleasing is pretty universal (with the exception of television and movie producers of the 1970s, who seemed to find discord pleasing and who were an anomaly). Certain vibrations (tones) have wavelengths that are compatible with other vibrations, and they can resonate together without divergence or degredation for a long time. Other combinations of tones have wavelengths that in a very short time disrupt each other and degrade into noise.

The fact of the musical language makes me wonder what kind of beings would use it as language. The obvious answer is whales - beings who live in a sound-conducting medium (air is a horrible sound conductor) with enormous lung capacity and no voice box as such, who don't use their mouths to speak or who perhaps don't have mouths at all. I suppose that plants could be using music to speak, since the entire outside of a given plant is a lung. However, most plants lack a focusing mechanism for the sound. Whales have a blowhole - a tube with a variable opening connecting the lungs with the outside. By varying the size and shape of the blowhole and the force of the expelled air, they create notes. How would plants create notes given their physiology? And why don't anteaters or tapirs sing? Elephants trumpet, a slightly gravellier cousin of a whale song. It makes me wonder - elephants are good swimmers. If an elephant were swimming in the ocean and stuck his trunk underwater and trumpeted, would it sound like a whale? Or would it sound like a Brit trying to speak Spanish (which always makes me cringe)?

At the end of the day, I have no idea what these dreams mean, represent, are trying to tell me, etc. All I know for certain is that it's a lovely idea, and it's hard for me to imagine things like marital spats in a language like that (maybe it would sound like the soundtrack from Psycho), or lies. What would lies sound like? Political double-speak? Marketing? Music to me is pure. It's just vibrations. I want to believe that in a medium so pure, it would be difficult to say things that weren't true.