Language and Music: Sound, Structure, and Meaning

Abstract

Language and music are the most impressive examples of humans’ capacity to process complex sound and structure. Though interest in the relationship between these two abilities has a long history, only recently has cognitive and neuroscientific research started to illuminate both what is shared and what is distinct between linguistic and musical processing. This review considers evidence for a link between language and music at three levels of analysis: sound, structure, and meaning. These links not only inform our understanding of language and music, but also add to a more basic understanding of our processing of complex auditory stimuli, abstract structure, meaning, and emotion.