Cognición musicalrelaciones entre música y lenguaje

Abstract

This paper approaches musical cognition trying to establish a parallelism between music and language. First, we discuss different proposal for representing music. Although, the theories on how music is represented vary in the phenomena that they try to explain and in the proposed units, if we make a parallel between music and language, we can identify different levels of representation (phonology, syntax and semantic) that may organize them. Second, we discuss some characteristics of the musical patterns that show similarities with language and that conform what we may call "the structure of the musical language". Third, we review data that address the possibility that music and language share storage systems. We discuss the manner in which music is integrated with text in the retention of melodies; the possible existence of a common short term memory mechanism for the retention of tones and phonological information. Finally, we introduce some neuropsychological data addressing this issue. We conclude that, although the processing mechanisms for music and language are not identical, it is possible to establish a parallelism at different levels of linguistic and musical that it is useful to organize theories and empirical data