# On music and language

*My (unsuccessful) submission to the 2025 ACX Anything-But-A-Book Review Contest, preserved here for posterity. Originally framed as a review of the aphorism "music is a language."*

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*Relevant context: I play jazz saxophone at a high level.*

Here are two situations that I’ve been in a million times and that feel strikingly similar:

1.  Conversing in Portuguese, which I speak mediocrely, and running into something I don’t know how to say.
2.  Improvising on the guitar, which I play less-than-mediocrely, and attempting to play something requiring a note outside of the rudimentary scales I’ve practiced.

In both cases, the feeling is that there’s a nice, well-formed idea in my head that I could express perfectly well some other way, but I’m blocked by my lack of ability. 

I want to contrast these with a third situation. I’ve been taking salsa classes for about half a year, with no prior experience with dance beyond doing the White Boy Shuffle™ at college parties. At my classes, the teacher puts on music and calls out a series of moves that we perform in real time, like the world’s least intimidating drill platoon. I’m great at this and nail it almost every time. Then I go to the club, where I find myself:

     3\. Trying to dance a whole five-minute salsa tune with no one telling me what to do,              and completely drawing a blank.

This is a much different feeling. The problem is no longer that there’s something in my head that I can’t get out; it’s that there’s nothing in my head to begin with, or at least no dance moves (my inner monologue, on the other hand, keeps a running commentary along the lines of “what was that spin we learned last week?” and “oh my god that’s the fourth time we’ve done that move in the last 30 seconds, surely she’s getting bored by now”).

I want to use the example of these three scenarios to argue against one interpretation of the statement that “music is a language.” Clearly it’s a pretty decent analogy at a high level; both involve transmitting some information over auditory channels, are constrained by culture-specific and essentially arbitrary conventions, and serve as media for creative expression. Language can be musical, music can feel like a conversation, and none of what follows should be taken as denying that. My aim is to set an upper bound on how far we ought to push the metaphor, rather than to outright reject it. 

All that said, the way of thinking that I claim is wrong goes like this:

“There are thoughts in my head. They spawn there in English, but since I also speak Dothraki and Kazakh I can translate them, or if I’m in Essos or Almaty sometimes they just spawn in those respective languages. Since music is a language, if I learn how to play the guitar I’ll be able to translate my thoughts into music, the way learning a bunch of words in a new language lets me translate my thoughts into that language.”

Instead, I claim:

*   The kind of thoughts you express when you improvise music (or dance) are completely distinct from the kind of thoughts you express with language (call them “music-thoughts” vs “dance-thoughts” vs “language-thoughts”)
*   There is no way to directly translate between these different kinds of thoughts
*   Non-prodigies without experience improvising will generally not have music or dance-thoughts, and there is no easy, fast, or obvious way to start having them (or to have better ones)

These strike me as the kind of claims that seem either obviously true or obviously false depending on your intuition, so let me first argue that they’re true and then that they’re not obvious. For the moment, I’m distinguishing between thoughts and feelings/emotions, and just talking about thoughts; I’ll come back to feelings at the end. 

In his essay “Musical thinking,” philosopher of music Jerrold Levinson distinguishes between two conceptions of music as thought…..just kidding, I’m arguing mostly from personal anecdote[^zhv80n0eimr]. You’ll have to take my word for it, but I promise that, in general, nothing remotely resembling natural language thought is going through my head when I’m improvising on the saxophone. This actually wasn’t clear to me before I started preparing this review; I’m usually just not paying any attention to what my brain is doing while I’m playing. As an experiment, I sat down, played for a bit, and tuned in to my thought process mindfulness-style as best I could. 

Like I said, I didn’t find an inner monologue per se, but it turns out that if I’m playing well, I can kind of “hear” what I’m about to play in my head a split second before it comes out of the horn. Those little phrases are what I want to call music-thoughts; they spawn without any particular effort or concentration (if the tune isn’t too complicated), and change in response to both the underlying harmony and whatever I played last. If I do have a language-thought (about the music, not just my mind wandering), it’s usually something along the lines of “I should incorporate that new thing (pattern, scale, etc) I’ve been practicing.” This can either trigger a corresponding music-thought[^mcci58lp1wo] or not; if not, I can shoehorn in the new thing anyway but whatever I play will invariably sound forced and mechanical[^cby4df179u6], like a 45-year-old trying to sound hip with some bit of Gen Z slang. 

My misadventures dancing further convince me that English-to-X translation is not what’s going on when I improvise. I have plenty of language-thoughts in my head while I dance, including thoughts about seemingly relevant things like the music, and I know a solid handful of moves, but despite my best efforts I can’t link the two up in any coherent way. 

Given that I’m pretty new to dancing, you could dismiss my problem as a lack of “vocabulary” (maybe I just don’t know the dance translation for “I hope the sound system explodes in the middle of this song before I run out of ideas”), but I think there’s at least one clear counterexample: classical musicians, who despite knowing their instruments inside and out and attaining levels of mastery I can only marvel at are generally unable to improvise[^odyfetzh6ul]. This contradicts the model where you start with general, undifferentiated Thoughts and Ideas, then get them into the world via your outlet of choice; were that the case, we’d expect superb technical skill on an instrument to be more than sufficient for realizing thoughts via music. If a few months and a couple hundred words on Duolingo are enough to start improvising sentences about *el gato en la biblioteca*, but twenty years of practicing violin until your fingers bleed aren’t enough to make it through 32 bars of “Fly Me to the Moon,” clearly the analogy is flawed. 

At this point, you might have noticed that, to the extent that domain-specific, untranslatable thoughts of uncertain genesis are a feature of the world, they’re surely not confined to language, music, and dance. Anyone who’s been a novice at an activity requiring creative decision-making, especially in real-time, is familiar with the feeling of paralysis in the face of a vast, apparently featureless possibility space, and anyone who has progressed past this level knows that ideas tend to arrive seemingly *ex nihilo*, rather than after a process of rational deliberation (and sometimes directly contradict what rational deliberation tells you!). Even in a basically objective, calculation-intensive activity like chess, there’s a difference in kind between an amateur who decides their next move after five minutes of mental simulation and a pro who sees a position and instinctively knows the best line. The latter doesn’t reduce to the former. 

In accordance with the theorem that nothing written by a rando on the internet can be simultaneously true, general, and novel, you can pretty fairly accuse me here of just reinventing something like [System 1 vs System 2 thinking](https://thedecisionlab.com/reference-guide/philosophy/system-1-and-system-2-thinking), and indeed we can tidily classify cases where you directly have an X-thought, like a musical idea, as utilizing System 1, and cases where you try to engineer an X-thought through deliberation as utilizing System 2. Still, I think there are some subtleties when it comes to music and language. First, I usually thought about System 1 and 2 in the context of practical decision making, as the difference between a gut reaction and a considered choice. Upon reflection, improvising is just making a continuous stream of micro-decisions and so should be subject to the same analysis, but on the surface creative activities seem like a different sort of thing than e.g. picking a washing machine based on vibes.

Second, the relationship of language to both systems is complicated, in that we often use language for System 2 thinking, but the process of forming thoughts into language itself almost always uses System 1 (unless you’re struggling to find the precise words for a thought, or translating into a language you don’t know well); it’s natural, spontaneous, and effortless. Thus the rough heuristic of “if I’m inner-monologuing about it, I’m using System 2” fails when what we’re considering is exactly the activity of inner-monologuing, or the music/dance/whatever equivalent. 

Technical points aside, my main defense against the charge of stating the obvious again comes from my personal experience. All of the beginner improvisers I’ve given lessons to ask some variant of the question “how do I decide what notes to play?” I usually say something about listening to the harmony, forming a coherent melodic idea, etc, but the real answer is of course that you don’t “decide,” at least at any conscious level; it’s like asking “how do I decide what words to say?” Some part of this question is probably wishful thinking – the kind of knowledge that you can learn from a textbook is always easier to acquire than the kind requiring raw experience – but I think at least some part reflects genuine confusion about what improvising actually entails. Moreover, despite my decade-and-a-half of experience improvising on the saxophone, I still fell into exactly the same trap when starting to dance! I spent months trying to figure out how I’m supposed to decide what moves to do before making the connection and realizing that the question is ill-posed[^81c7xd2paps]. 

Thinking about music and dance as involving their own distinct kinds of thought also clarified the concept of “expressiveness” for me. To give a mildly self-incriminating example, I play fighting games competitively, especially the Super Smash Bros. series. There have been various editions of Smash throughout the years for different consoles, and all have their devotees, but the version for Nintendo GameCube (“Melee”) is widely regarded as having the highest skill ceiling and allowing for the most precise control of your character. Melee diehards love to talk about how “expressive” the game is, and for a while I rolled my eyes whenever I heard this[^ghxilmk3w5f]. Like, what could you possibly be expressing with a combo in Super Smash Bros. (other than maybe anger)? 

I now think that this skepticism stemmed from the view of language-thoughts as privileged or fundamental, and of expression in other domains as requiring translation from language to the medium of choice. On the view where Smash-thoughts (or maybe fighting-game-thoughts) are their own kind of thing, it’s obvious how to interpret the claim that Melee is expressive; it’s simply an overall better vehicle for realizing these sorts of thoughts, the same way that a saxophone is a better vehicle for realizing music-thoughts than a kazoo[^m3lfb2kpx7j]. A more everyday domain replete with non-linguistic expression is fashion; self-expression in the context of an outfit doesn’t mean somehow transmuting your opinions about pizza toppings into a choice of shirt and pants. You just have an outfit-thought, and realize it to the best of your ability and wardrobe.

The other phenomenon that I feel like I understand a little better in light of the view I’ve articulated is talent. Lurking in the background this whole time has been the question “how do you start having X-thoughts/have more interesting X-thoughts?” It’s seemingly paradoxical; you want to train your unconscious mind/System 1/Primordial-Soup-Whence-Your-Thoughts-Emerge via directed effort, but directed effort is pretty much by definition a conscious activity. It turns out that the best you can do is some combination of ingesting/analyzing good examples and just trying to do the thing yourself, with a mix of pre-planned ideas and randomness, and eventually your brain does magic and starts generating ideas of your own. It’s intuitive that something like this must be true when it comes to *improving *ideas — there’s no deterministic recipe for having better language-thoughts, after all — but since most of us don’t remember learning our first language, we don’t have a good reference for the process of going from having no ideas to some ideas (“gaining consciousness,” if you will). Having a step clearly labeled “the brain does magic” provides a convenient slot for an otherwise-nebulous concept like talent; it consists at least in part in how efficiently your brain does that magic. 

So where does all this leave us with respect to “music is a language”? Clearly in some ways music is *like* language, but those are mostly ways that music and language are also like everything else. I think the main link propelling the aphorism is the similar-seeming relationships of music and language to emotions, which I’ve been ignoring until now. It’s true that songwriters can write sad songs to reflect or give voice to their sadness in much the same way that poets can write poetry, and listeners/readers might find that the two media resonate with their own emotional states in similar ways[^lgxn7j0gijp]. That said, I think what’s going on when someone writes e.g. sad poetry is closer to description of or inspiration from an inner state, rather than the brain-to-reality transfer that happens when I play a musical idea. It’s hard to see how someone could express their sadness with the same sort of directness; emotions just don’t seem to have a corresponding medium in the exterior world the way that music-, dance-, or language-ideas do. Still, if you’re unconvinced, you can just take the preceding arguments as applying to the dare-I-say majority of ideas across types that aren’t intended to reflect an emotion. 

I’ll conclude with a caveat. I’m a pretty good musician and improviser, but the talent distribution has a long tail, and it’s definitely possible that my claims here no longer apply past a certain level. Maybe Chris Potter[^ojnktci5m3] really can play a Shakespearean sonnet on his horn. I also don’t have synesthesia and have never tried psychedelics, both of which could conceivably scramble sensory modalities enough to make translation between thought-types possible (or at least seem reasonable from the inside). For those groups, music might genuinely be a language. For the rest of us, it picks up [right where language leaves off](https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/hans_christian_andersen_192604). 

[^zhv80n0eimr]: His essay is excellent and touches on many of the ideas to follow, if you’re into that sort of thing. https://www.musicandmeaning.net/issues/showArticle.php?artID=1.2 

[^mcci58lp1wo]: The corresponding music-thought is still not a musical translation of the English-thought, the same way that the Portuguese word cão is not a translation of “I should write the Portuguese word for a furry four-legged friend.” 

[^cby4df179u6]: How can I play something without having a music-thought about it? In the end, notes on instruments are produced by series of physical actions. If I know what buttons I need to press to play a certain scale, I can play it even if I don’t instinctively know what it will sound like before it comes out. 

[^odyfetzh6ul]: Am I claiming classical musicians who can’t improvise don’t have music-thoughts? Kind of; clearly they have beautiful and nuanced thoughts vis-a-vis interpretive elements of music like dynamics, tone, tempo, vibrato, etc. Still, I think it’s fair to say that the content of e.g. a language-thought is (mostly, usually) distinct from its verbal delivery, and so I’m comfortable restricting the content of music-thoughts by definition to more constitutive elements like melody, harmony, and rhythm. 

[^81c7xd2paps]: This is the main reason I think I’m not purely fighting a strawman here. Even if few people would defend the view that music is literally a language the way that Portuguese is, I think many people implicitly expect learning music to be like learning language in a way that presupposes similarities that don’t exist. 

[^ghxilmk3w5f]: Some putative examples of self-expression in Melee: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ui0ExdoEBNA 

[^m3lfb2kpx7j]: This doesn’t mean that anyone who plays the other versions of the game is somehow wrong; I accept that the piano is on balance a better instrument for expressing music-thoughts than the saxophone (for one, you can play multiple notes at the same time), but the saxophone has a unique character that I like, and excels at certain aspects of expression, such that it’s not strictly dominated by other instruments. The same goes for Smash.  

[^lgxn7j0gijp]: The standard idiomatic English here would be that artists are “expressing” their emotions, but I’ve already introduced the idea of expression to mean the concrete realization of an idea.  

[^ojnktci5m3]: As good as it gets. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UeRQWQnCuuY&t=174s