WHEN

WORDS The not-so-secret connection

between music, language,

FAIL
and the brain

Dr. Sean Hutchins

The Royal Conservatory of Music
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1 Music is a Language 8 Language Abilities of Musicians
2 Overlap of Music and Language 9 Benefits of Early Music Training
3 Rhythm in Speech and Music 10 The OPERA Hypothesis
4 Pitch in Speech and Music 11 Neural Overlap
5 Prosody: The Music of Speech 13 RCM Research
6 Emotions in Music 15 Summary
7 Infant-Directed Speech 16 References

6 THE ROYAL CONSERVATORY WHEN WORDS FAIL

MUSIC IS A
LANGUAGE

Everyone loves music. It’s culturally

universal. It resonates deep within us.
It is, along with language, the most
important form of communication
we have. Despite this, for many
people music is something that
they experience, but do not believe
themselves able to produce or express.
Formal music training can seem like
a daunting but necessary precursor
to musical expression.

In contrast, speech and language

come naturally; though we may
“When words fail, music speaks.”
spend time crafting our words, we – Hans Christian Andersen
don’t feel we need years of training
to get our ideas across. Most
usage to their neural underpinnings.
people feel comfortable expressing
We’ll discuss the ways they work
themselves in words. But speech is
together, and the surprising ways
about more than just words. In fact,
that music can help language ability.
speech and music are more closely
Most importantly, we’ll show the
linked than we might first consider.
ways that even non-musicians can
In this paper, we’ll show the incorporate music into their daily
similarities between music and lives, and express their music
language — from their structure and through language.

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 OVERLAP OF MUSIC
AND LANGUAGE
Music and language share many
similarities across various levels • Medium of sound
of analysis, including the form • Written forms
they take, the goals of each, and • Primarily voice
their individual elements. While
FORM • Non-vocal forms (sign language,
there are differences as well, this instrumental)
• Rule-based structure
structural overlap can help to
explain the connections between
language and music.

GOALS

• Expressing
emotions
• Fostering social ELEMENTS
and interpersonal
relationships
• Demonstrating
proficiency • Pitch
• Rhythm
• Timbre
• Neural basis

2 WHEN WORDS FAIL

RHYTHM IN SPEECH
AND MUSIC
One of the most important shared characteristics between music and language is
rhythm. Even though we don’t normally think of language as having a rhythm,
speech itself can have a series of strong and weak beats — as anyone who has
familiarity with poetry can tell you. In fact, an entire musical genre, rap, is built
from the fusion of the rhythmic elements of speech and music.

Even in everyday speech, language “syllable-timed” languages, such What’s your Style?
has a characteristic rhythm. In English, as French, don’t use this pattern of What’s more, studies have found
different syllables can vary in stress, strong and weak beats, but tend that a composer’s native language
leading to alternation of strong and to time every syllable roughly the can influence the type of music
weak beats. You can see this limerick- same. And this makes a difference to they write. A 2003 study showed
like pattern across whole sentences, listeners. You can tell the difference that English composers were more
but rhythm can also distinguish between languages from the rhythm likely to write music with more
between two words, as in OB-ject vs. alone. In fact, we might have more rhythmic variability compared to
ob-JECT. practice with this than any other French composers. This mirrors the
part of language. Although a fetus greater rhythmic variability in
It turns out that not every language
cannot make out individual words in English than French speech. What’s
has the same rhythm, though.
utero, the rhythm of speech comes incredible is that this holds up even
English is a “stress-timed” language,
through clearly — just like the beat for music without any words! Your
where strong beats tend to come
of a noisy neighbor’s stereo from native language can influence your
in a predictable rhythm. In contrast,
the next apartment. musical style.

The musial poetry of limericks

Many types of poetry use strong musical rhythms, but this is particularly clear in limericks, which use a strong
6/8 meter with a regular pattern of strong and weak syllables.

There was a young wo- man named Bright whose speed was much fast- er than light she

set out one day in a rel- a- tive way and re- turned on a pre- vi- ous night

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PITCH IN SPEECH
AND MUSIC
Just like rhythm, pitch is an important part of speech and music. The rise and fall
of the voice can change the meaning of an utterance, and speech without changes
in pitch can quickly sound dull and robotic.

Although English does not use pitch led to many embarrassing situations Music to our Ears
alone to distinguish between different for people learning the language).
Have you ever repeated a word so
words, many world languages do. Tone languages can use pitch height
many times that it starts to sound
These languages, called tone to distinguish between words, or they
weird? Well, it turns out that with
languages, include Mandarin, Thai, can use pitch rise and fall within a
some types of speech, listening to it
Yoruba, Navajo, and hundreds of word, as in Mandarin. Speakers of
over and over can actually make it
others. In Mandarin, for example, the languages that use tones are more
sound like singing! This is known
syllable /ma/ can mean horse, mother, likely to develop perfect pitch, showing
as the Speech-to-Song illusion,
scold or hemp depending on the rise yet another crossover between speech
discovered by Diana Deutsch.
and fall of the voice (which must have and language processing.
Composer Steve Reich used this
phenomenon in his Grammy-award

Singing: The Best of Both Worlds winning piece “Different Trains,”

created from taped interviews.
Music and language are not separate
Spoken phrases that have more
domains. Singing provides a great example
regular rhythms and steadier pitches
of how music and language can co-exist
within each syllable are more likely
and enhance each other. In good vocal
to be perceived as singing, especially
music, the notes and the lyrics serve to
after being repeated. Auto-tuning
accentuate each other, and the rhythms,
builds off of the same insight; if
pitches, timbres, and dynamics all work
you’ve ever heard music created from
together to create something greater than
auto-tuned voices (for example,
the sum of its parts.
Auto-tune the News or T-Pain), its
musicality comes from the steadier
pitch and more regular rhythm that
the voice is made to fit into.

“Music is the universal language

of mankind.”
– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

4 THE ROYAL CONSERVATORY WHEN WORDS FAIL

PROSODY: THE
MUSIC OF SPEECH
Have you ever written a text message that has been misunderstood? Do you ever
wish there was a sarcasm font? The written word cannot express the same nuance
that we can convey through spoken language because, unlike speech, writing
lacks prosody.
Prosody deals with the pitch, Musical cues Corpus callosum Cingulate gyrus

duration, loudness, timbre, and Even the emotion of a sentence

emotion of speech — everything that is largely conveyed through these
makes it musical and that can’t be musical cues. A sentence like “The
captured in writing. Maple Leafs won tonight” will have
quite a different tone depending
One common way we use prosody
on whether the speaker cheers for
to express meaning is when we raise Hypothalamus
Toronto or Montreal. Whereas a
or lower the pitch of our voice to Amygdala
Toronto fan may say this quickly,
indicate a question or a statement.
with a high pitch and bright timbre, Mammilary body
Hippocampus
The pitch of an utterance can often
a Montreal fan might use the
rise by as much as an octave when
asking a question. Another example
same words but say them slower, Neural Responses to
is when we want to express
with a lower pitch and darker Emotional Cues
tone. The same cues that express
emphasis – pitch, timing, and
emotion in speech also have musical Music and language can even trigger
loudness can be used to indicate
counterparts. Studies of emotion the same areas of the brain when they
a particular word’s importance.
in music show that artists can use are eliciting emotional responses.
Consider the difference between
similar variables to add nuance to One study has shown that fearful
“Give DAPHNE the grapes” versus
their performances. For listeners music and fearful vocalization can
“Give Daphne the GRAPES” –
and performers, an understanding both activate the amygdala neurons
the focus of each is different and
of prosody leads to a diversity of in the brain; other studies have shown
would be spoken in distinct ways.
interpretations and gives music a similar effects with other neural
complexity beyond what is simply circuits in the limbic system (the part
written on the page. of the brain that deals with emotions,
memory, and stimulation). Scientists
have suggested that our neural
TORONTO FAN: MONTREAL FAN: processing of musical emotions may
The Maple Leafs The Maple Leafs have evolved out of brain systems
won tonight! won tonight. originally adapted for vocal emotions,
explaining the link between the two.

Quickly, with a high pitch and bright timbre Slower, with a lower pitch and darker tone

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 EMOTIONS
IN MUSIC
One of the biggest differences between speech and music is that, unlike musical
notes, words can refer to concrete, tangible things in the world. Emotions in
language can come from the meaning of the words: A sentence like “I dropped
my ice cream cone” conveys a negative emotion simply through the meaning of
the words, even without any speech prosody. So how does music convey emotions
without the aid of tangible meanings? There are three major ways: Resemblance,
piggybacking, and self-reference.

Perceiving emotions end of a physical movement to the

First, musical sounds may physically way that a musician slows down
resemble things in the world. A flute as they reach the end of a musical
may sound like a chirping bird, or phrase — the association between
a driving rhythm may resemble a these things can help us to perceive
moving train. The similarities between the emotion in a piece.
these things can evoke an emotional
Finally, music can evoke emotions
response, based on our feelings
simply through self-reference.
towards birds or trains.
In short, musical structures and
Second, music may evoke emotion patterns set up expectations that
by piggybacking off of other forms the patterns will continue. When
of communication. The same tools these expectations are violated, we
that allow us to understand prosody experience an emotional reaction —
in speech help us to use similar cues similar to how we might react to a
in music. Music can also piggyback magic trick or a joke. This means that
off of visual art, body language, or greater understanding of music (and
movement. Compare the way that thus stronger expectations) can lead
people slow down as they reach the to heightened emotional responses.

“After silence, that which

comes nearest to expressing
the inexpressible is music.”
– Aldous Huxley

6 THE ROYAL CONSERVATORY WHEN WORDS FAIL

INFANT-DIRECTED
SPEECH
One of the most striking examples of the musicality of speech occurs when we
speak to infants. People have a natural instinct to adopt a sing-songy voice
when a baby is around; this speech pattern is colloquially called “Motherese”
or “Baby-talk,” but scientists who study the phenomenon (yes, there are
scientists of baby-talk) refer to it as infant-directed speech.

Infant-directed speech has several Bonding through emotion

characteristics that make it more Studies have shown that infants
musical than a normal speaking prefer being spoken to this way,
voice. It tends to be higher in pitch, and will not respond as well to
and involve more changes in pitch people speaking in an adult-directed
that we would otherwise use. It manner, even their own mother. Even
also exaggerates the dynamics of if the words are not meaningful to
the voice, with louder louds and the infant, the emotions conveyed
softer softs. The phrases, too, through the prosody are, and can
tend to be different, with shorter help the child and caregiver bond.
overall utterances, a slower rate of
Infant-Directed Singing
This speech prosody is cross-cultural,
speech, and longer pauses between
and isn’t limited to just mothers or Adopting this style around babies
each phrase. This has the effect of
babies. Fathers will use the same isn’t just limited to speech; there’s
emphasizing both individual words
speaking style with infants, as will evidence that caregivers also
and the structure of the shorter
siblings, or even unrelated adults. change the way they sing to babies.
phrases, making it easier to pay
Infant-directed speech is also Infant-directed singing has similar
attention and remember the words
quite common when speaking to characteristics to infant-directed
and phrases. This is thought to
animals (“Who’s a good doggie? speech, including higher pitch, slower
provide scaffolding for babies as they
Yes you are!”), perhaps due to us tempo, and more dynamic range. The
develop language skills. In essence,
unconsciously projecting child-like timbre of the voice changes as well,
the musicality of the voice is helping
characteristics onto animals. including a warmer, “smiling” sound.
the child learn their language.
Just like with infant-directed speech,
babies prefer infant-directed singing
to adult-directed singing, and can
tell the difference between the two.
What’s more, they can tell if you’re
faking it – just pretending there’s a
baby there won’t help most caregivers
get the right tone. Like in most
performances, authenticity matters!

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LANGUAGE ABILITIES
OF MUSICIANS
One of the most interesting implications of the links between music and language
is that abilities seem to be able to transfer between domains. Over the past two
decades, numerous studies have shown that musicians outperform non-musicians
in language-related tasks.
At a basic level, musicians show
better abilities to recognize speech
in a noisy context (like you’d find
in a crowded party), and better
phonological processing (recognizing
and manipulating the basic sounds
of speech).

Musicians also perform better at

more complex speech tasks. When
it comes to recognizing emotions
in speech prosody, remembering
lists of words, or learning a foreign
language, it pays to have some
Never Too Late to Study Music
musical training. One common question parents have about music lessons is when is the
right time for their child to start. Although there are still unanswered
These effects aren’t just limited
questions about how music and language skills develop together, it’s clear
to professional musicians, either.
that the earlier a child starts, the greater the benefits. What’s more, these
Rather, anyone with a considerable
benefits can last a lifetime. As musicians age, their hearing and language
amount of formal music study
abilities show less decline than those of non-musicians. One study showed
(10 years or more) demonstrates
aging musicians with perceptual abilities matching those of non-musicians
these increased abilities.
15 years their junior.

Even if you’ve never had the opportunity to study music as a child, all is
not lost. A recent study of older adults taking piano lessons for the first
time showed improvements in word recognition in a noisy environment,
accompanied by stronger neural responses to attentive listening. The
upshot? It’s never too late to start taking music lessons.

8 THE ROYAL CONSERVATORY WHEN WORDS FAIL

BENEFITS OF EARLY
MUSIC TRAINING
Children taking music lessons show improvements in many of the same areas
that we see in adult musicians: They learn to better recognize emotions in speech;
are helped in learning a second language; and can more easily perceive words and
sentences in a noisy environments. Evidence also shows that music training in
childhood can be linked to vocabulary size, grammar, and reading abilities, as
well as overall IQ.

Mastering language
One of the most robust findings
that scientists have seen is an
improvement in phonological
processing. The ability to recognize
different sounds of the language,
and to connect letters with the
sounds that they make, is crucial to
children mastering language. This
phonological skill is linked to reading
ability, and children with music
training tend to show better reading
abilities as well. Poor phonological
skills are often indicative of speech or
reading disorders, such as dyslexia,
and while music training shouldn’t
be thought of as a cure for these
problems, it is true that basic musical
skills, such as pitch and rhythm,
are associated with enhanced
phonological skills.

Benefits to language processing may

also lead to improvements in other
fields as well. Children who can
better understand their teachers may
be able to learn more in a classroom understanding the words in a noisy learning the material itself. The
setting, across different subjects. By classroom, children may have more benefits of language processing can
requiring less mental energy to simply mental energy to devote towards cascade across a child’s entire life.

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 THE OPERA
HYPOTHESIS
Why do skills gained through music training benefit language abilities? And why
does much of this transfer go only in one direction? One answer is the OPERA
hypothesis, first advanced by noted scientist Ani Patel. The OPERA hypothesis
suggests that there are five relevant factors:

O
OVERLAP
P
PRECISION
E
EMOTION
R
REPETITION
A
ATTENTION

Music requires precision Thus, when musicians practice, it

Together, these factors can explain trains those neural processes to an
why musicians tend to outperform even higher degree than needed for
non-musicians on tasks like hearing normal language processing. This also
speech in noise, phonological explains why music training tends to
processing, and learning a foreign benefit language processing, but we
language. These tasks use the same don’t see the converse effect. What’s
basic acoustic processing as music, more, a high level of practice is both
but music requires much more effective and sustainable because music
precise processing in order to achieve creates positive emotions with high
competence. Hearing a semitone levels of attention – without eliciting
difference, for example, is crucial boredom. Music is practice for your
in music, though unlikely to make brain that is actually fun to do!
a difference in speech processing.

“Music expresses that which

cannot be said and on which it
is impossible to be silent.”
– Victor Hugo

10 THE ROYAL CONSERVATORY WHEN WORDS FAIL

NEURAL
OVERLAP
One of the assumptions of the OPERA hypothesis is that there is overlap between
brain areas that process music and language. Both MRI and EEG studies have
shown evidence for this neural overlap at several different levels of processing.

The auditory brainstem response

(ABR) is one of the earliest levels of
acoustic processing in the brain. This Auditory
stimulus
is a small signal that can be found
in the brainstem, the oldest area of
the brain, starting about one one-
hundredth of a second after a sound
is heard. The ABR can track the Event-related potential
pitch of sounds, including syllables
Amplifier
and notes. Not only are speech and
music sounds processed by the same
MMN
region, studies show that musicians’
brains do a better job of tracking
pitch in these sounds in both music Signal
and language. Thus, musicians’ brains averager
have a higher fidelity encoding of
these sounds to work with.

Later stages of processing also show P600

overlap between music and language.
500 1,000
For example, the automatic brain Time (msec)
Stimulus
response to an unexpected change onset
(the mismatch negativity) is similar
whether the sounds were speech or
music. Even conscious processing, Superior processing abilities temporal and frontal cortices, which
such as a late response to syntactic These responses often show are relevant to both sound processing
errors (over half a second, which is neurological evidence for musicians’ and higher-level music and language
forever to the brain), can look similar superior processing abilities, even for processing. The brains of musicians
in both domains. language stimuli. Similar evidence show stronger connections between
can be found in brain scans, too. The these regions, not to mention
brains of musicians typically show stronger connections between the
more grey matter volume than those left and right hemispheres, via the
of non-musicians, especially in the corpus callosum.

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 M
Left vs. Right Brain
While many of the left-brain vs. right-brain differences we hear about in
popular media are more suited to an online quiz than a scientific journal,
speech vs. music processing may be one area where these differences hold
up. It all comes from a mathematic limitation called the time-frequency
tradeoff. In short, the more precise you want to get in tracking the
frequency of something, the less precise you can be in time, and vice-versa.

In understanding speech, we need to be able to process very quick changes

in sound — a few dozen milliseconds can make a big difference —
but tracking the exact pitch isn’t very important. In music, on the other
hand, a quarter-tone can make a huge difference in tuning, but pitches
don’t tend to change as quickly as speech syllables do.

To be able to process both signals, the brain uses different hemispheres

to make different tradeoffs: the left hemisphere goes for greater timing
precisions, whereas the right hemisphere goes for better pitch precision.
Thus, while the left side of the brain is more used for language, the right
side of the brain really is more musical!

12 THE ROYAL CONSERVATORY WHEN WORDS FAIL

RCM
RESEARCH
Here at the RCM Research Centre, we are conducting our own research into
music and the brain, and much of it revolves around questions about the
relationship between music and language.

Our largest project has been a

longitudinal study looking at the Vocabulary Ability Letter and Number
Naming Speed
benefits of early childhood music
116 110
education. Here, we are measuring

Composite CTOPP RSN Score

109
115
musical and cognitive outcomes for 108
Standardized PPVT Score

114 107
children in our Smart StartTM program, 106
114
group lessons for children age 0-6. 113
105
103
This program also serves as an 111 104
introduction to music theory, and uses 110
102
102
a curriculum developed to promote 109 102
the use of various cognitive skills such 108 102
Pre Post Pre Post
as attention, memory, and cognitive
flexibility. We found that these
children improved in both musical and Identification Phonemic awareness
Imitation Phonemic memory
linguistic ability over the course of a
Reading Rapid symbolic naming
school year, and see benefits to both 100% 120

vocabulary size and pre-reading skills 115

COTPP Composite Scores

90%
Percentage Correct

110
You can read more in our 105
80%
publication Music Perception. 100
rcmusic.com/musicandlanguage 70% 95
90
Another recent project at the RCM 60%
85
showed that this improved linguistic
50% 80
ability for musicians carries over into Non- Instru- Vocalist Non- Instru- Vocalist
musician mentalist musician mentalist
adulthood. Our study of university-
level music students, including those
at our Glenn Gould School, showed
than non-musicians — a useful skill a factor that can help language
that they were better at many of the
in a multi-cultural world. comprehension and its use.
same phonological and linguistic skills
that were improved among our Smart A related study also showed that Our research is helping to learn more
StartTM students. A test of ours even musicians were better than non- about the connection between music
showed that musicians could musicians at both discriminating and and language and why musical
understand foreign accents better imitating the pitch of spoken words — training can transfer across domains.

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14 THE ROYAL CONSERVATORY WHEN WORDS FAIL
SUMMARY

Music and language are so closely

related that it’s sometimes hard to
figure out where one starts and the
other leaves off. Even though we think
of them as separate, they often use the
same physical and neural structures,
and this comes through in the way
they are used.
We’ve seen that training in music
can improve our abilities to work
with language, from the basic neural
level all the way up to emotional
prosody and second languages.
Scientists, including those at
The Royal Conservatory, are learning
more about the specific connections
between music and language all the
time. But what is already clear is that,
no matter your native tongue, music
truly is the universal language.

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REFERENCES
Cooper, R. P., & Aslin, R. N. (1990). Preference for infant-directed speech in the first month after birth. Child development,
61(5), 1584-1595.

Deutsch, D., Henthorn, T., & Lapidis, R. (2011). Illusory transformation from speech to song. The Journal of the Acoustical
Society of America, 129(4), 2245-2252.

Hutchins, S. (2018). Early childhood music training and associated improvements in music and language abilities.
Music Perception: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 35(5), 579-593.

Koelsch, S., Skouras, S., Fritz, T., Herrera, P., Bonhage, C., Küssner, M. B., & Jacobs, A. M. (2013). The roles of superficial
amygdala and auditory cortex in music-evoked fear and joy. Neuroimage, 81, 49-60.

Meyer, L. B. (2008). Emotion and meaning in music. University of Chicago Press.

Palmer, C., & Hutchins, S. (2006). What is musical prosody?. Psychology of learning and motivation, 46, 245-278.

Parbery-Clark, A., Skoe, E., Lam, C., & Kraus, N. (2009). Musician enhancement for speech-in-noise. Ear and hearing, 30(6),
653-661.

Patel, A. D. (2011). Why would musical training benefit the neural encoding of speech? The OPERA hypothesis. Frontiers
in psychology, 2, 142.

Patel, A. D., & Daniele, J. R. (2003). An empirical comparison of rhythm in language and music. Cognition, 87(1),
B35-B45.

Patel, A. D., Gibson, E., Ratner, J., Besson, M., & Holcomb, P. J. (1998). Processing syntactic relations in language and
music: An event-related potential study. Journal of cognitive neuroscience, 10(6), 717-733.

Ramus, F., & Mehler, J. (1999). Language identification with suprasegmental cues: A study based on speech resynthesis.
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 105(1), 512-521.

Schellenberg, E. G. (2004). Music lessons enhance IQ. Psychological science, 15(8), 511-514.

Trainor, L. J. (1996). Infant preferences for infant-directed versus noninfant-directed playsongs and lullabies. Infant
behavior and development, 19(1), 83-92.

Wong, P. C., Skoe, E., Russo, N. M., Dees, T., & Kraus, N. (2007). Musical experience shapes human brainstem encoding of
linguistic pitch patterns. Nature neuroscience, 10(4), 420-422.

Zatorre, R. J., Belin, P., & Penhune, V. B. (2002). Structure and function of auditory cortex: music and speech. Trends in
cognitive sciences, 6(1), 37-46.

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THE ROYAL CONSERVATORY WHEN WORDS FAIL 17
ABOUT THE ROYAL CONSERVATORY OF MUSIC
The Royal Conservatory is one of the largest and most respected institutions in the
worlddedicatedtomusicandarts-basededucation.Providingthedefinitivestandard
of excellence in music education through its curriculum, assessment, performances,
and teacher education programs, The Conservatory has had a substantial impact
on the lives of millions of people globally. In addition, the organization has helped
to train a number of internationally celebrated artists including Glenn Gould,
Oscar Peterson, David Foster, Sarah McLachlan, Angela Hewitt, and Diana Krall.
Motivated by its powerful mission to develop human potential through
leadership in music and arts education, The Royal Conservatory is committed
to the advancement of research and science in the field. Consequently,
The Conservatory has emerged over the last two decades as a leader in the
development of arts-based programs that address a wide range of social issues.

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18 THE ROYAL CONSERVATORY WHEN WORDS FAIL