Listening in tongues

By Zach Hagadone
Reader Staff

A long time ago, on a road trip through the countryside surrounding the German-Austrian border, the girls with whom I was riding broke into song when one of them popped in a CD of Kinks songs. When they came to the chorus of “Apeman,” the lyrics came to them as, “I’m an eggman, I’m an egg, eggman, oh I’m an eggman.”

More than 20 years later, I still can’t hear that song without automatically converting “apeman” to “eggman,” and I also have to suppress an impulse to poke fun at those German girls for unintentionally bungling the lyrics. I certainly wouldn’t do any better trying to sing along to a song in a language other than the one I grew up with. And that got me wondering why someone would even try — what’s more, why would someone listen to music in a language they don’t understand in the first place?

All that ruminating led me to realize that much of my favorite music comes in tongues I don’t speak — pretty much any and all “classical” music of the European tradition will be rendered in Latin, French, Italian or even German. I also do love an early- to mid-20th century chanson, but that doesn’t mean I’m fully following what Edith Piaf or Serge Gainsbourg are actually saying.

I have a deep affection for Russian and other Eastern European folk music, but that stuff is completely unintelligible to my ear, as are the folk songs I like from Wales and the Spanish-speaking world. And you can forget about songs I find catchy from places like East Asia, Central Asia or the Middle East. 

If I really kept track and analyzed it, I reckon I don’t understand what’s being said in about 60% of the music I listen to by choice.

That’s weird to think about, but I’m not alone.

You can look back over centuries to find examples of people absorbing songs whose words they don’t follow — particularly in religious settings, where for hundreds of years the Catholic service (including its songs of praise) was conducted exclusively in Latin. Of course, it’s also in religious environments where the phenomenon of “glossolalia” is to be found — that is, “speaking in tongues” as a perceived channeling of angelic or otherwise supernatural language outside the literal understanding of the speaker or their listeners.

Meanwhile, the reason people seem more than OK with listening to music that doesn’t mean anything to them vocally has to do with something called “sound symbolism.”

According to an article on the subject published by Vice.com, it turns out that the human mind is just as happy to interpret meaning and mood from a song’s rhythm and tempo, instrumentation and tonality, as it is from the literal meaning of the words that accompany those elements. In fact, we might like the sound of those words more because they’re divorced from straightforward meaning — as one expert told Vice, “Song frees the voice from any burden of saying anything meaningful.” Rather, listeners can concoct their own meanings that may or may not line up with the linguistic text, but respond more directly to how the music makes them feel (a powerful psycho-physical reaction called “entrainment,” which puts us literally in harmony with the sounds around us).

One quirky example is the unlikely 1970s hit “Prisencolinensinainciusol,” composed by Italian pop singer Adriano Celentano. Its unwieldy and obscure title hints at what lay behind its success: Its lyrics are almost entirely nonsense (except for the words “all right”). Otherwise, the song was meant to replicate the sound of an English-language song as it would be heard by a non-English-speaking audience. In other words, if you’re an English speaker who wants to know what it’s like for non-English speakers to listen to music in “our” language, “Prisencolinensinainciusol” will give you that experience.

Beyond that, deliberately creating a song without any obvious lyrical meaning makes us rethink how understanding is conveyed through music beyond “words,” as we commonly understand them. Finally, what really matters is identifying that subjective quality of a song simply being “catchy” — kind of like how saying “eggman” instead of “apeman” doesn’t diminish the Kinks any, at least for me — and that might be the best evidence to support the old cliche about music really being the “universal language.”