Music as Language Music as Language Links to Other Pages and Places Try to consider music from the viewpoint of a linguist.
Western music is a both written and 'spoken'.
The written language, as with most languages is a reasonable approximation to the spoken form. The written language is not universally applicable to all music as listening to any middle eastern music illustrates. For one thing, it has no standard provision for microtonal embellishments that interpolate the semitone. Although many complications can be written, microtones are not. As the written form of western music crosses human language barriers, written western music has a functional similarity to Chinese ideograms.