Mapping phonemes to music

"the melodic stream is pitch-disjunct and may be articulated by timbrel colouration...the language stream is timbre-disjunct and may be articulated by pitch inflections"
- Trevor Wishart On Sonic Art. York, Imagineering Press, 1985. p 156

  is there inherent structure in the phonemic layout of a text?

there is in the alliteration and rhyme of a poem as well as it's phonemic rhythm (lexical vs phonemic listening struggle)
there may be in language distinctions

                

               Jean-Jacques Nattiez -  need for a well defined set of graphic symbols, similar to the symbols used in phonetics, as being essential for the musical analysis of non-scored music. For anyone attempting to analyse electronic/computer music a set of universally understood descriptive symbols would be useful.

               Wishatt compares the timbre fields of languages with the harmonic fields of music, equating the chromatic field of tonal, tempered instruments with the phoneme field of a single language and the harmonic field of non-tempered instruments with the phoneme field of other languages


Gustav Becking Der musikalische Bau des Montenegrischen Volksepos (1932) links phonemic structure of language to musical form and style.


               

                

Creating a musical composition from the phonemic structure of a poem

               Guido of Arezzo (1026?) map phonemic structure of a text to pitches of plainsong with the following mapping:

vowel:

a

e

i

o

u

pitche:

G

A

B

C

D

 

E

F

G...



             

               

Symbol, ASCII number and ID number attached to each phoneme

ee -seed

E*

 69

m - mow

m

109

 

i - slid

i

105

n - no

n

110

 

a - spade

A*

 65

ng - sing

N*

 78

 

e - sled

e

101

DIPHTHONGS

 

 

 

a - had

a*

 97

o - no

x*

120

 

a - lamb

L*

 76

ou - pound

W*

 87

 

STOP PLOSIVES

 

 

 

ai - pail

B*

 66

 

t - to

t

116

i - pile

I*

 73

 

p - pat

p

112

oy - toy

Y*

 89

 

d - do

d

100

SEMI VOWELS

 

 

 

b - bat

b

 45

w - witch

w

119

 

g - gone

g

103

wh - which

M*

77

 

c - cast

k

107

y - you

y

121

 

BACK VOWELS

 

 

l - law

L

108

 

a - palm

R*

 82

r - raw

r

114

 

o - hot

o*

111

CONTINUANT FRICATIVES

 

aw - paw

H*

 72

f - file

f

102

 

oo - look

K*

 75

v - five

v

118

 

oo - boot

U*

 85

th - thy

T*

 84

o - float

O*

 79

th - bath

F*

 70

 

 

 

s - sue

s

115

CENTRAL VOWELS

 

 

h - hat

h

104

ir - bird

D*

 68

ss - mission

Z*

 90

 

er - brother

P*

 80

s - vision

J*

 74

 

u - mud

u*

117

z - zip

z

122

 













* These symbols are not used by the IPA.

The speech sound /Q/ is used in the process shown here, not the traditional two phoneme symbols /k/ and /w/.




Reich: rhythm/pitch inflections map to string quartet content
Lansky: obscure denotative - enhance inflection
Bach: BACH
Cope: EMI


 


  Sound Kitchen (Hiroko Shiraiwa-Terasawa's 250 project)

Schematic for sonifying code optimization and debugging (See Vickers, Caitlin project)

Booleans
Conditionals
Loops, For, While,