The Art of Language Invention, Episode 5: Musical Conlangs

How might one go about creating a musical language? This video summarizes some of the major issues facing the creator of a musical conlang. **FURTHER EXPLANATION RE: CHORDS** Okay, here's what I meant when I was talking about using chords vs. using notes. I actually confused two slightly different concepts, as I spent a long time thinking about how a musical language could work with a stringed instrument like the guitar. Yes, there are definitely more chords than notes, if you're only working within a single octave—especially if you allow for multiple octaves and chords with more than three notes (e.g. six note chords on the guitar). There are definitely enough chords to produce a phonology as large as a spoken language's. It is much more difficult to switch from chord to chord than note to note, though, so if one treated chords like phonemes, the language would be a nightmare to use, and probably wouldn't be as quick as a spoken language. Something I considered, though, was using chords to produce a minimalist language (something like my language Kelenala). There, though, I think you don't have enough chords. A good minimalist language should have at least 100 words—possibly 200 or 300. While there certainly are 100 chords and more, in order to produce enough chords to hit that number, you really have to dig deep and admit some truly awful sounding chords, along with six note chords that differ from one another by only one note. It'd just be way, way too difficult to use and to understand. The result is that I don't think chords are a good set of tokens. I think you really do have to go with notes, unless lexical meaning in your musical language is arbitrary, and changes from piece to piece. That is, the grammar is constant, but in "The Dance of the Hummingbirds", a Cm7 chord means "hummingbird", whereas in "Fluffy Bunnies Take Everest", a Cm7 chord means "bunny". I did consider how a chord was played (arpeggio, strummed, struck, etc.), but I think it's too difficult to understand. However, consider that if your word was B-G-E, you could play those notes one after the other, or you could just play the chord. That might be considered the short form of the word. That might be a possibility to consider. It's still an open question, though, how to make the result sound musical as opposed to noise. The possibilities for such a language, though, are so tantalizing, that someone just has to try it. LINKS: (1) 0:58: Description of the conlang Solresol: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solresol (2) 5:03: Description of binary code: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_... (3) 5:47: Description of the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode 11001001: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/11001001 (4) 13:11: Description of the Pirahã language: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirah%C... (5) 13:11: Reference for the Kele drum language: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kele_pe...)