Is music a language? Music is very repetitive, so if it is a language, it is not a very efficient language.
Or maybe music was a language. But when a lot of stuff needed to be said, music took too long, because it was so repetitive. So music, as a language, got replaced by something more efficient.
Non-repetition in Spoken Language vs Repetition in Music
In spoken language, you say a sentence, and your listener (usually) understands what you said, and then you are free to say another different sentence, and then another sentence, and so on. Or maybe your listener will have a turn, and they can speak a sentence to you, and their sentence does not have to contain any repetition of what has been said so far.
Sentences in a conversation relate to the meaning of the sentences that have previously been spoken, but there is absolutely no requirement for different sentences to sound the same as each other.
Indeed it would normally be regarded as somewhat suspicious if patterns of repetition of sound started occurring within conversational speech. (It would no longer be a conversation - it would be some kind of performance.)
In music, on the other hand, repetition of sounds is a central part of what is going on.
You “say” something, which might be a musical phrase. And then you might “say” exactly the same thing a second time.
And even if you “say” something different, there is an expectation that it will have some recognizable similarity to the sound of what has been “said” previously.
The purpose of language is to communicate information, and in some situations you want to communicate as much information as you can in the shortest amount of time.
Based on these requirements, music is not very satisfactory - a communication system where you have to repeat large chunks of what you already communicated is not an efficient system of communication.
Maybe music was once a primary system of communication. But at the same time it was, for some reason, severely constrained to be repetitive.
Maybe music tried to evolve to be less repetitive, but, the repetition was so deeply built into the mechanism of music production and perception that all attempts to reduce or remove the repetition failed. Or perhaps the processes of evolution succeeded in removing some of the repetition, but they never succeeded in removing all the repetition.
And eventually a new form of communication evolved, one that didn’t require any kind of repetition to happen - where you could say one thing, and then go straight on to saying a second different thing. And then a third different thing, and so on.
And that new form of communication was the word-based spoken language that we all speak today.
And once this new more efficient system of communication evolved, the old musical system of communication had to get out of the way, and it ceased to be a form of communication.
But, for some reason we don’t quite understand, the music did not fully disappear. It no longer existed as a system of communication, but it continued to exist as a kind of “pseudo-communication”, something that feels like it is communication.
An Example: singing “I love you”
The singer sings “I love you”, and the audience listens, and it is as if the singer is communicating to his audience that he loves them.
But the audience didn’t come to the concert to find out whether or not the singer actually loves them. Indeed many of them already know the lyrics off by heart, so the words being sung are not new information about anything.
The audience didn’t come to the concert to learn new information - they just came to enjoy the music.
Decommunicationalization
There is one odd thing about the example I just gave, because it’s meant to be an example about how word-based language is a form of communication, and music is not a form of communication, but in the example the music actually contains words, but I’m still saying that it is not a form of communication. To put it another way, when music and words are combined, and the brain of the listener has to decide whether or not it is communication, there is a conflict between the music that says (in effect) “this is not communication” and the words that say “this is communication”, and the music wins.
My main hypothesis is:
Music originally evolved to be a form of communication.
Music then evolved not to be a form of communication.
Spoken language, consisting of words, evolved to be a form of communication.
But which happened first, item 2 or item 3?
It’s most likely that item 3 happened before item 2, if for no other reason than it’s better to have some form of communication rather than none.
So this gives us a tentative history:
Music evolved to be a form of communication.
Spoken language, consisting of words, evolved to be a form of communication.
Music then evolved not to be a form of communication.
But then we can ask: as item 2 occurred, how did music and spoken language co-exist?
We might suppose that they just existed as two independent things, ie there was a musical system of communication, and there was a spoken word-based system of communication.
But of course we know that songs are a thing, and songs consist of words and music intimately mixed together.
This suggests a variation as follows:
Music evolved to be a form of communication.
Spoken language, consisting of words, evolved as an extension of the musical system of communication.
Music then evolved not to be a form of communication, and the word-based language evolved to stand alone, and not be mixed into the music.
To coin a new word, I propose a further hypothesis:
Music was decommunicationalized
This concept of “decommunicationalization” is important, because it is not just a matter of music ceasing to be a form of communication. Rather, the decommunicationalization affects everything that is associated with the music, and not just the music itself.
In particular (returning to my example above), it explains why songs are not communication, even though songs contain words, and words by themselves, in the form of spoken language, are communication.
This then leaves us with the current state of word-based language and music:
Word-based spoken language is a form of communication.
Music is a form of pseudo-communication, which feels like communication, except that it isn’t communication, because it has been decommunicationalized.
Music with words in it is also a form of pseudo-communication, because the decommunicationalizing effect of the music also applies to the words mixed into the music.