2015 release ** Featuring: Zuriñe F Gerenabarrena, Alberto Prezzati, Alice Calm, Yuka Nagamatsu, Martina Claussen, Livia Giovaninetti, Sergey Suhovik, Yang Siyu.
"To use the terminology of the neuroscientist Steven Brown, who has made a particular study of music, both music and language involve a limited repertoire of discrete building blocks, organised into phrases and higher-order structures using combinatorial rules. Put simply, both organise individual acoustic elements using a kind of grammar, which can be built into larger structures such as novels and symphonies. For both we also use expressive phrasing, where we modulate acoustic properties such as pitch and rhythm “for the purposes of conveying emphasis, emotional state, and emotive meaning.” In both music and language, certain modes of symbolic expression are the same across all cultures and intensify along with the emotion: happiness is expressed through faster, louder and higher music or speech, sadness by the opposite. Dean Falk, an anthropologist who specialises in the evolution of the brain, tells us that language and music are “neurologically intertwined”, and has concluded that “they began evolving together by two million years ago.”