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If you’re good at languages, does it follow that you’re good at music, and vice versa? In this episode I talk about links between languages and music. I explore similarities and differences between learning and using languages, and learning and playing music, based mainly on my own experiences.
Links
Languages and Music
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3338120/
https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/133/the-relationship-between-music-and-language
Edinburgh Language Event
https://edinburghlanguageevent.com/
Tunes features in this episode
Hedge Cats / Cathod y Gwyrch
See the score for this tune.
The Whistling Windows / Y Ffenstri Sïo – a tune I wrote on various instruments in 2017.
Here’s a video I made at a music session in Y Glôb, a pub in Bangor. Musicians from Wales, England, Singapore and France were there that night.
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Being a native speaker of Chinese (not a Mandarin language, though) who grew up in what used to be Western Germany and whose primary language is Standard German, I always thought that adults that are into music are the only ones that have a chance of becoming proficient in languages from the other end of our Eurasian Continent. More often than not, the Chinese don’t realize that pitch contours are not at all the same as stress, and the rare German and English speakers that respect tone seem to be intonation-blind.
I think that being musical certainly helps when learning tonal languages like Mandarin. It certainly helped me, anyway.