Musical Conlang Idea

[caters]

So, I've had this idea of doing a musical conlang, but it brought me to many questions. Here is my attempt at answering them, feel free to give me any feedback on this conlang. So, first off, how many pitches? Well, for the first note, there would be 12 pitches. Second note, I think will have 2 pitches. Other notes will have 7 or 9 pitches.

Okay, so what would the first note do? Well, I think it would be acting as a sort of topic marker, with each note corresponding to a different topic, maybe like this:

Note Topic
C - Everyday/Small talk
Db - Love/Dating/Intimate talk
D - Politics/General Announcement(things like: Who are you voting for? The president will give his speech now. Beethoven Concert at 6:00 PM etc.)
Eb - Religion
E - Exciting/Disappointing Announcement(things like: I'm having a baby! We won the game! I lost. etc.)
F - Family talk(things like: So, where do you want to go today children? I'm sorry to say this, but Grandpa passed away. etc.)
F# - not sure yet, maybe some input here?
G - Lecture/Class/Education
Ab - not sure yet, maybe some input here?
A - Children's talk(Children have a higher natural pitch, and I think of A as being a high note. Children also have a lower vocabulary, so it makes sense that they would stick to one or 2 tonics for at least their first 10 years)
Bb - Music(things like: Who is your favorite composer/songwriter? What's your favorite genre? I just love Mozart. I can play the piano. etc.)
B - Self-talk

Essentially, the tonic is the topic and would be indicated by something like this at the beginning of the first sentence:



A change in topic would be signaled by another one of these long notes at a different pitch, on the downbeat.

The second note indicates the general mood, whether it's a positive or negative mood. It corresponds to the third, the modal note of any key. So a positive mood would be indicated like so:


This could be happiness, excitement, even a neutral feeling about the situation

A negative mood would be indicated like so:


This could be sadness, anger, frustration, fear, any sort of bad feeling

So major key = positive mood and minor key = negative mood. Here are some common tonic, modal note pairs and what they indicate:



A change in mood is indicated by a note from the parallel key suddenly showing up. So, in your everyday situation, this might be Eb, Ab, or Bb for a negative shift and E for a positive shift. A and B wouldn't necessarily indicate a change in mood from negative to positive, as they can be found in variants of the C minor scale.

I don't know what the meter of the music, like whether it's in 3/4 or 6/8 or 4/4 would indicate, but it probably would indicate something, maybe some input on what the meter could indicate would be helpful.

Dynamics have the most relevance and meaning with negative moods. However, they also have some relevance and meaning with positive moods. A forte dynamic in major would indicate that the person is very happy or even excited. A piano dynamic in major would indicate a more neutral feeling about the situation. Self-talk, which is in the tonic of B, tends to be in the pianissimo to mezzo-piano range, except when the mood is negative, in which case forte is common as well.

A forte dynamic in minor would indicate a more outward negative mood like anger or fear. A piano dynamic in minor would indicate a more reserved negative mood like sadness.

I haven't figured out yet how to go from words to music, but I'm thinking that this might be the general relation:

Vowels -> Long notes, shortest at quarter notes, longest at whole notes
Stop consonants -> Short notes, usually eighths or quarters, although they might become sixteenths in fast speech
Liquids and glides -> Longer notes at the start of a word, maybe half note or dotted quarter, since they tend to cross syllable boundaries in the middle of words, probably ties in that case
Fricatives -> Also longer notes, however, since they have less of a tendency to cross syllable boundaries, there probably wouldn't be any ties where fricatives are

Likewise, I haven't figured out when the pitch should rise and fall yet, perhaps you could give me some input on this?

Any input on it? Do you think this is a good start for my musical conlang? Anything I'm missing that would be relevant for a musical conlang?

[Dormouse559]

Musical conlangs are always interesting, so I look forward to seeing where you take this. This conlang appears to put a heavy emphasis on music theory, and my knowledge of music theory can be summed up with "Do-Re-Mi" from "The Sound of Music", so I can't comment on that aspect. I suppose I wonder what you imagine the language sounding like: Would every sentence be a coherent melody, or do musical aesthetics have to be sacrificed to encode meaning?

On the linguistic side, I would like to learn more about the underlying principle of the topic notes. Some of them appear to communicate, well, topics, but others give the nature of the speech (announcement), how the speaker feels about it (exciting/disappointing) or the identity of the speaker (child).

[aaakknu]

Do you intend the language to be understandable by listening to everybody? Or just people with perfect pitch?

You have to take into account that when people listen to music they can't tell the difference between D and Db, they hear the intervalic relationships between notes. So instead of attaching topics to specific notes, you could attach them to different scales (there are many more existing and theoretically possible scales beyond just major and minor - https://ianring.com/musictheory/scales/).

I like the idea of a musical conlang, especially if it can be practically usable and sounds nice. But it can hard to create. I thought about doing it myself, but don't have enough motivation.

Good luck with your conlang!