Relationship Between Music and Language

For centuries, the definition of music is keeping changing. People feel and express their own feeling through the combination of numerable notes but produce a variety of masterpieces. The function of music interests scientists a lot and is explored by folks in different aspects. To know more about it, a contrast is also made between music and other art form. The relationship between music and language is a controversial issue and it will be the topic of this article. Some scholars show the view that music is definitely a form of language for we use both to communicate and to express thoughts and feelings. Meanwhile, others show a totally different viewpoint, they said ‘ the idea that music is anything like language is ridiculous. True, both music and language express feeling and emotion. But language, unlike music, is designed to communicate specific thoughts from one individual to another. Thoughts have words which have their own meaning; music has tones which have no means by themselves.’ Without doubt, both point have their support. The emphasis of the present article will be on these two views.
Firstly, the first voice. About the first half sentence, I hold a questioning attitude. Review the long history of the development of music, from the a cappella in Middle Age period until the rock music in 20th century, music and language has an inseparable connection. Facing the similarities between them two, people even can’t distinguish them and come to believe that they are (almost) the same thing (Patel, 2008). We can notice that in the prospectus of 2008 Dijon conference, it indicated, ‘the similarities between those two activities are therefore not superficial: music and language could be two expressions of the same competences for human communication ( Jackendoff, 2009).’ In Rousseau’s theory, he thought that music was developed before the language and the latter was a subspecies. As a great philosopher, people believed that although he might have been