The Language of Music (It's not what you think.)

Or, la solresol lasi solmisolre.

In last week’s newsletter, we investigated how the musical qualities of language — its rhythms, pitches, and intonations — affect how babies cry. But what if we stretched beyond this music-language connection to establish an even more concrete link? What if we took advantage of the universality of music to create a universal language based in music itself?

You may already be familiar with constructed languages. Known informally as “conlangs,” these are languages that were created from scratch by linguists for various purposes, from facilitating global communication (Esperanto) to filling out the Star Trek universe (Klingon).

While not many people will grow up speaking these languages as a mother tongue, they are still learnable, and aficionados around the world have created pockets of space to use them for communication. Esperanto boasts over 100,000 speakers today. You can even learn conlangs like Esperanto and Klingon, along with Game of Thrones’ High Valyrian, on the popular language learning app DuoLingo.

But in the early 1820s, even before Esperanto was introduced to the world, Frenchman Jean-François Sudre was busy toying with a novel idea: using music itself to create a novel language. And although it wasn’t as great a success as other conlangs, it was still a fascinating attempt to shape the future of how we communicate and connect with others.

A Musical Code

A music teacher by trade, Sudre spent much of his life pondering and examining the intricacies of music. But his perception of what music could do shifted when he created a code corresponding letters of the alphabet to musical notes. He tested out this code (not yet a language) with one of his young music students, and before long, the two were able to ask and answer questions across the room via piano and violin.¹ Whispers of the Langue Musicale soon escaped beyond the confines of his apartment building, and Sudre and two of his students toured France to demonstrate this new “language” to audiences across the country.

This “language” soon captured the attention of a different audience: the French military, who saw its potential for communication during battle. However, there was a problem: Sudre’s original code consisted of 12 musical notes, following the Western chromatic scale (A through G, with all the sharps and flats in between). The military clarion, on the other hand, was limited to just four notes. To accommodate their needs, Sudre simplified his code, dubbing this iteration Telephonie.

Even when Telephonie proved successful in transmitting messages (such as the delightful “You will destroy the bridge at 6AM”), the military remained skeptical. For one, relying on music to transmit messages on the battlefield wouldn’t be especially useful if the sound couldn’t carry far enough to be heard. Sudre continued to make modifications at the military’s recommendation, creating an instrument amplifier and even a system of tuned cannons, but it never fully caught on.

Can’t hear ya, bud!

The Inception of Solresol

Finding little lasting success with the French military, Sudre decided to leave them behind and bring his system to the people, resulting in his final iteration: Solresol. Rather than twelve notes or four notes, Sudre found a sweet spot with the seven natural notes (the white keys on the piano). Using their corresponding solfege names as a new “alphabet,” Sudre went beyond a musical code to construct a new language: La Langue Musicale Universelle, or Solresol.

Unlike the previous iterations of his musical “language,” Solresol differs in that the seven solfege notes — do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, and si (ti) — serve as the building blocks for each word. The name “Solresol” itself is the word for “language” in Solresol.

To ensure that the words wouldn’t get too unreasonable, Sudre created some lexical restrictions as well. For example, there is a five syllable limit for each word, and the seven base notes are frequently found words such as “the” (la) and “yes” (sol). Generally speaking, there are no synonyms, and antonyms are inverted. However, this isn’t set in stone — for example, while “forget” (lamisol) and “remember” (solmila) are follow this rule, "food” (dolafare) and “linen” (refalado) are also backwards but certainly not antonyms of each other.

Like any other language, Solresol also has its own system of grammatical features. To make the plural form of the noun, you would double the length of the last syllable of the word. Parts of speech are marked via emphasis. For example, emphasizing the second syllable in reDOmido refers to the noun form “slanderer,” while emphasizing the third syllable redoMIdo takes the adjective form “slanderous.”

To make words a little easier to remember, Sudre also attempted to group words semantically, marked by the first syllable of the word.

Source: Paul Collins.

Like the antonym rule, this wasn’t a hard and fast rule, but for those learning the language, lumping words into these categories could assist generally with memorizing long patterns of Solresol words.

But How Do I Speak It?

So, is this language spoken, sung, or played? This can yield some complications. In order to communicate via Solresol in its pure musical form, you could benefit from an awareness of fixed perfect pitch (although Sudre argued that this wasn’t necessary). You could also speak the syllables rather than singing or playing their corresponding musical notes. To make things a little more accessible and universal, Sudre developed corresponding hand signals for Solresol, which would allow deaf or mute users to still use the language without even hearing the music itself.

In addition to hand signals, musical notes, and spoken syllables, Solresol syllables can correspond to different colors of the rainbow, numbers, and a syllabary of different shapes. So in theory, Solresol could be used to communicate in any number of ways. (Maybe too many ways...) For the musical version, take a listen to Genesis 1:1 translated into Solresol. And check out this Russian linguistics forum in which Solresol users communicate via written Solresol.

Solresol was a novel, ambitious idea — but just how realistic is it? Just take a look at this Solresol/English/French online dictionary and your brain might start to spin a little bit. Even with semantic categories and special rules like the antonym rule, Solresol is certainly limited by the fact that it only consists of seven building blocks. Mathematically, the possibility for the creation of new words is limited — and remembering the correct order of syllables for all the words you’d need in daily conversation can be quite a challenge.

So in the end, Solresol never really caught on as a popular conlang (with one factor being that Sudre always had difficulty securing funding to really spread the word about La Langue Musicale Universelle). But there are still plenty of enthusiasts who are still dedicated to learning and developing resources for Solresol today.

If you’re interested in joining their ranks, the most comprehensive archive of resources can be found at Sidosi.org (or, “learn”), which includes a Solresol translator. There is also a subreddit dedicated to Solresol enthusiasts. So if you’re a fan of all the possibilities that Solresol offers, this could be the conlang for you!

Thanks for reading this week’s newsletter — I hope you found it interesting! I found Solresol fascinating, and even though I don’t think I’ll be learning it myself, I certainly respect Sudre’s innovative mind.

If you haven’t subscribed to this newsletter and are interested in learning more about the story of language, would you consider subscribing? It helps me a lot and I’m always so excited to connect with new readers.

Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you next week!

1. Collins, P. (2000). Solresol, The Universal Musical Language. Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, 5, 50-66. https://i.sidosi.org/resources/strange-epic-tragic-trajectory/strange-epic-tragic-trajectory.pdf