There is a musical illusion, in which a spoken sentence is looped, until gradually, a subtle perceptual change occurs in the mind’s ear, and the words turn into tones, and the sentence becomes a melody. The illusion shows that there is no unique physical property of sound that accounts for a voice being perceived as spoken or sung.
Like the chicken and the egg and the proto-chicken, philosophers have long pondered the fine line between speech and song. When children speak, they are incredibly melodic, with large dynamic intervals, in constant songful dialogue with the world around them, until they grow up to be flat monotonal adults who can barley sharpen their pitchless questions. Some people retain their melodic speech, and are usually singled out for being overly dramatic, annoying, or just generally ridiculous-sounding, unless they happen to be the Dali Llama or what have you.
Thankfully, the Germans have a word for it―sprechgesang, meaning “spoken-song”. These days, music is as invasive as the recorded-word, and any sound of questionable tunefulness, will be auto-tuned, vocoded, recalyzed, and enslaved into song. On the other end, rapping revenges music, by spitting song back into speech.
Superfluous language, imprecise diction, mispronunciation, discourse particles, valspeak, casual swearing, and other verbal diarrhetics that are the scourge of old-guard academics, may actually serve a hidden musical function, as their misuse flourishes against all pedagogical efforts to the contrary. The musicality of language may trump such petty concerns for propriety and top-down standardization.
Every creative writing teacher since grade school has explicitly told me to avoid adverbs at all costs; literally [sic]. How else can I modify a whole goddamn sentence? Not everyone is so ultra-mod cool economical as to banish an entire part of speech. Those sorry old fools! Adverbs rule. Nothing peeves pedants more than the excessive use of adverbs, especially when they are flat-out wrong, as in the example below.
The adverb, “literally” is clearly not meant to be taken literally here, although the speaker doesn’t mean “figuratively” as it is commonly mistaken for, but rather something like “quasi-literally”, which doesn’t really mean much of anything, and barley modifies the thrust of the sentence. Yet, this is the way people talk, and it would seem that the bulk of useless adverbs we use, are there for a musical reason.
The classic “-ly” adverb in English, is what musicians would call a “triplet”―a tri-p-let―or a rhythmic figure of three beats. If the sentence above is put into an even 4/4 time signature, the adverb “literally” acts as a triplet lead-in to the predicate. Though it is actually a four-syllable word, the natural vowel clipping of linguistic evolution renders “literally” a swinging triplet, perfect for jazzing up our soliloquies. It acts like an ornament to a musical phrase, while not essential to its flavor, shapes and spices the spoken-song. The abominable adverb is like the musical segue, or the Kerouacian Dash―strung from sentence to sentence, decking his pages like Christmas―that may not mean anything, anymore than the stars in the sky, but help keep the beat of the conversation kicking.
To hear the musical illusion in the sentence above, a harmonic context is not necessary, only repetition is needed to reveal the latent melody. However, I added some accompaniment to demonstrate the fine line of song and speech, the proximity of the musical notation, and how any sentence can be made into a melody without some fancy pitch correction software.
“Literally in F# Phrygian”
There probably needs to be a brand new discipline to study all this nonsense―musicolinguistics, or whatsoever. The musicolinguists will show us how most everything we say can be reduced to meaningless musical ornaments, that gussy up a dysfunctional family of pronouns, and one or two verbs that we’ll get around to doing one of these days.
In Hip Hop, singing is girly. In Speech, melody is childish. In America, adverbs are despised. Can the musicolinguists literally save us from ourselves?
To hear an excellent example of sprechgesang, check out Devil Doll’s epic masterpiece “Mr.Doctor”. The eponymous singer is a master of spoken-song, sung-word.
