Quote:

abridged by themilum without proper permission

When we speak to each other we process a very complex set of equations that are quite quickly and accurately resolved into meaning, intent, accent and perhaps even direction. Language is quite firm in most of these four divisions.

Music doesn't make hardly any of those as clear as speech, yet in spite of this can be transcribed about as easily.
Scribing the semantics of music is futlie even if meaning is often prescribed, but the meanings of 'musical' sounds are a personal overlayment. Intent, like language, draws from context, but unlike language, music is again strictly a personal endeavor.

The rules for music are much less stringent and at the same time, within this universality, we can only hear a fraction of the possibilities that it offers and therefore it creates more anticipation of understanding of it than we do at a wonder of its newness. This may speak toward my suggestion of 'direction'... perhaps a musical application of Chomsky's Syntactical Hierarchy will yeild a "Universal Music Theory"...



As for me, Musick, I think that Chomsky is a jerk and a joke and I think you are certainly not. But I don't understand your overall point within your remarks above. Can you give your "meaning" in a different way?

Here is what I think...

I think that music is older than language - obviously - bird songs, the whistling winds in tall trees; all the variable sounds of nature.

Then after we learned to talk some enterprising unknown shaman found out that rhymes and chants gave legs to the myths that gave his tribe social cohesion. Social cohesion is an imperative when your group is fighting other groups and the very esssence of our music today is simply an echo of the social contract that was made a long time ago by tribal man.

What? You think music "Holy"?