Music systems and language

Asides from learning German, I love playing music. In my opinion, it is deeply related to language. As a drummer, I cannot count bars if it's not in Spanish or in an Indian system called "konokol".

Also, I learned something very interesting recently while learning the piano that got me thinking about this. I already knew the US has a different note system than many Spanish-speaking countries. They read notes as "C D E F G A B", while in Mexico we use "Do Re Mi Fa Sol La Si". 

What I learned has to do with the Germans. My teacher told me that they, additionally from using "C D E...", say "D sharp" as "dis" and "D flat" as "des", and the same with the rest of the notes. I researched a bit and you can find the rest of the notes here. It probably has to do with their phonetics. It is amazing as well as problematic because there are just too many ways of doing the same thing. 

I just wanted to share, I also wonder what other people's experiences with music and languages are. Because I am not a linguist, I have no idea of how deeply connected they are. I would love if someone told me more about their relationship :) 

I'm a huge fan of both music and languages and I used to sing in a choir for a long time. We learned songs in a lot of different languages, from my native Serbian to English, German, French, Italian, Chinese, Norwegian, Latin, Macedonian, just to name a few. For me, learning to sing in a new language actually made it much easier to get the hang of pronunciation. I still love to listen to foreign music and just take in the sound of the language, it feels so great to listen to something completely foreign become familiar as I listen to the song repeatedly.

Also, in Serbian musical education, we use both the alphabetical and the Do-Re-Mi notation, with the added fun part that for us it goes C-D-E-F-G-A-H-C instead of C-D-E-F-G-A-B-C. B is the name for H flat. I have no idea why, and it usually confuses the hell out of kids who learn the notes for the first time. :D

That's amazing! I do love to listen to music in other languages too. I listen to pop/rock music in German, but I also get to listen to lots of music from the US because of my jazz appreciation class. In the same class, we once also listened to some pretty bizarre and also beautiful music from eastern Europe that doesn't have a pulse! It blew my mind when I first heard it because the concept is very foreign to me. 

I just recently started with the piano, so I am as confused with that notation of "B equals H flat" as the Serbian kids. It probably changes the structure of the whole system a lot: scales, chords, etc. However, it is also very fascinating because people are probably able to create so many different things that in western culture would require more effort. Maybe when I know much more about music I will try to learn it!

Other language music is great, I like kpop, chinese music and sonido