The Language of Musicians

Tamara Phipps:

Have you ever been at a gig and heard the roadies performing a sound check? For all the sense they make at times; musicians may as well be speaking German. This is because they use several distinct features of language on a regular basis when talking to one another.

 

The first feature of language that crops up in musical speech is specific terminology, or specific words from the musical lexis. A specific lexis is a group of words that are all related to each other by association. For example, the words surgery, transfusion, nurse, x-ray and scalpel are all specific to the medical lexis, although there is always some crossover where many words belong to more than one lexis. When musicians speak, they use terminology that is mostly unique to the musical lexis. For example "In the fourth bar of the middle-eight on the second track, can we change the Gm to a Dm, and add in another push on the crash?" That's a fairly specific example, but there is a lot of specific terminology used in music.

 

When specific terminology doesn't apply, or more likely the musicians in question can't remember the word they are looking for, metaphors and similes are used instead. Metaphors are words or phrases that are used to describe something by using a phrase that is not literally applicable. For example, "England is a melting pot of culture." Of course, England is not literally a melting pot; the phrase is just describing the fact that England has a lot of different cultures all coming together and influencing each other. Musicians use it in much the same way, for example "When you play that bit just after the bridge, make it sound kind of choppy and stabby." Obviously the musician in question isn't going to physically stab or chop the piano, but it is just another way of telling the piano player to keep the notes staccato. Similes work in much the same way. A simile is the act of describing something by comparing or likening it to something else. To quote The Beatles: "It's been a hard day's night, and I've been working like a dog." For musicians, it's more like "That riff needs to be lightning quick!"

 

Further still, if musicians cannot remember the terminology, or think of a metaphor or simile to describe what they are trying to tell the others, they will frequently use onomatopoeias instead. Onomatopoeias are words that are formed from the sound that they represent, e.g. bang, crash, cuckoo. When musicians use onomatopoeias, it is to replace terminology, or lack of any words to express the sound they are looking for. E.g. "In that bit, instead of just hitting the crash, how about you go ba-dum-dum-psh, on the toms and then hit it afterwards?"

 

Overall, musicians use a wide range of language features to communicate, resulting in a special 'language' of their own. As strange as it sounds at times, without it, we may not have certain parts of the great music we have today!