Music – or language in action?

Music is more than just sound. Sharing many features with language, it has all the hallmarks of a communicative system, as Cambridge researchers are showing. Music and speech are best conceived of as having co-evolved as components of a generalised human communicative toolkit." - —Professor Ian Cross - In present-day Western cultures, we tend to underestimate the remarkable overlap between music and language in the functions they fulfil as communicative media. At first glance, music seems to us quite different from language; after all, we clearly cannot exchange information through music as we do through language. But if we shift our cultural perspective, we find that in many traditional societies music is not just presentational but also participatory. People engage with each other in musical performance, making music together - what has been called 'musicking'. Among the research priorities of the University of Cambridge's Centre for Music and Science (CMS), established in 2003 in the Faculty of Music and staffed by Professor Ian Cross and Professor Sarah Hawkins (respectively, specialists in music and speech), is the relationship between music and language as closely interconnected systems of communication.