The similarities between sheet music and written language are indisputable. The desire to communicate, for connecting in some way with other people, has evolved over the course of human history. All through recorded history, mankind has created sounds, drawn drawings on stones and created languages, including music, to build relationships and share ideas and feelings. A 2007 Georgetown University Medical Center study stated that music and language are processed in similar ways by the brain.
According to an article in Science Daily \”One brain system, based in the temporal lobes, helps humans memorize information in both language and music- for example, words and meanings in language and familiar melodies in music. The other system, based in the frontal lobes, helps us unconsciously learn and use the rules that underlie both language and music, such as the rules of syntax in sentences, and the rules of harmony in music.\”
Linguistics authority Michael Ullman, Ph.D. states, \”Both language and music crucially require the memorization of arbitrary information, such as words and melodies.\”
The roots of written language have been traced back to ancient Mesopotamia where clay tokens were used for record-keeping as early as 8,000 BCE. Clay tokens gave rise to a cuneiform alphabetic comprised of wedge shaped characters sometime around the end of the fourth millennium BCE.
The earliest forms of sheet music were actually musical notations that are believed to have evolved along with, and borrowed heavily, from the cuneiform scripts that were widely used throughout the Middle East. The earliest known visual representations of musical sounds are thought to have evolved from Egyptian hieroglyphics.
Oxford Music Online states that, \”Written notation is a phenomenon of literate social classes. In all societies, it has developed only after the formation of a script for language, and has generally used elements of that script.\” Such notational systems were widely developed in Europe and much of Asia, including Japan, China and Korea. Far fewer notational systems were developed in much of Southeast Asia and the Middle East, with the exception of Turkey.
Vocal music notation is believed to have originated in Western Europe while instrumental notation is thought to have been developed in Mesopotamia, Egypt and Greece.
Today, composers, conductors and performers use notation in the creation and analysis of a wide variety of sheet music, including church sheet music, band sheet music, jazz sheet music, etc.
Although written language has remained highly segmented throughout history, sheet music is nearly universally understood by musicians of various national, cultural and ethnic backgrounds.
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Language and Music Share a Common Ancestery
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