Is there a connection between the sounds of your language and your tonal preference within music?

Answer

Dear Willem,

a connection as you suggest has, to my knowledge, not been demonstrated, and seems to me rather unlikely, although there is clear evidence that language and music are not completely separate.

To begin with, there is more and more evidence recently that the language we speak does influence our perception of reality, because each language forces us to pay attention to certain distinctions or to understand the world in a certain way. parts. These distinctions and classifications will then also play a prominent role in the rest of our thinking. For example, it appears that speakers of languages ​​with grammatical genders (such as French, German or Dutch, but unlike English or Finnish) make associations with concepts that are partly determined by the gender of the words for those concepts in their language. A nice and comprehensive article about this and similar phenomena recently appeared in the New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/magazine/29language-t.html?pagewanted=all.

If language influences our thinking, it is not unreasonable to assume that the language we speak also has an effect on our musical perception. It already appears that speakers of tonal languages ​​such as Chinese (where the tone in which a word is pronounced is a distinctive feature of that word – and a different tone therefore produces a different word) more easily develop an absolute pitch for musical tones. Conversely, research shows that students who have learned to play a musical instrument are better at analyzing intonation in language use. So there seem to be connections, but the effects are rather subtle.

As far as the development of a certain tonality is concerned, however, the most obvious explanation seems to me to lie in a cultural-historical angle (for example, the development of Western tonality is dominated by the thinking of Pythagoras).