In a recent issue of Tape Op, Cibo Matto’s Yuka Honda appreciates how when speaking Japanese, it’s easier to explain music abstractly and ask for highly specific instructions from Japanese musicians: “Can we make this part a little bit more like the quiet before [the] storm when we can’t really see anything?” In English, the players want something more concrete. In everyday Japanese speech and culture, she alludes that there’s more of a sensitivity to this kind of abstraction.
Interestingly, she also says "when we [Japanese people] speak to each other in conversation we use a lot of sounds rather than words.” And those sounds stand for a whole range of emotions and experiences that are often impossible to quantify across cultures. But again, among Japanese musicians, it’s a shared sonic language.
The way we speak determines our perceptions. Here are words that (English-speaking) musicians often use as a lingua franca when writing or recording music: angelic, airy, chimey, brittle, breathy, glassy, shimmering, tinny, shiny, fuzzy, crispy, crunchy, hard, mellow, loose, big, boomy, beefy, fat, muffled, warm. These might seem completely subjective (and they can be), but they generally correspond to specific ranges on the audio spectrum. This list of words starts at the high, treble end of the spectrum and descends to the low, bass range. When I’m talking with a musician, we might have different ideas of what “angelic” means, acoustically-speaking, but it at least points us to the upper ranges of the audio spectrum.
The dominant term also changes with time. A decade or so ago, “crunchy” was preferable among my crew of musicians, since lo-fi, analog aesthetics were popular in underground circles. Now I hear a lot of younger musicians preferring “vibey” music and sonic choices: on the mellower end of the audio spectrum, not a lot of treble but plenty of mid and bass range. Something that’s deep but also atmospheric, whatever those terms mean to you.
It’s interesting that certain vowel and consonant sounds correspond with certain audio frequencies. Big, boomy, beefy: that’s all on the bass side. Is that because bass happens to start with a “b”? Possibly, but somewhere, we also collectively decided that bass means “big,” “voluptuous,” “chunky”—a sonic body that takes up a lot of space. To my ears, “b” words like “breathy” and “brittle” don’t sound big, even if we don’t know their definitions. Maybe it’s because of that “r”—it requires more air to make that sound, which places those words somewhat higher on the sonic spectrum.
The words we use for animal sounds are also different around the world. We’re hearing the same sounds, but interpreting them with different sonic configurations. A pig can “oink,” “boo boo,” or “nöff-nöff,” depending on where you’re from. And there are cultural differences encoded into these sound words, as linguistic researcher Derek Abbott points out:
In English we have rather more sound words for dogs (woof, yap, bow wow, ruff, growl) than in any other language as English speaking countries tend to have the highest dog ownership per capita. There are also clear differences when you look at how the same language is used across different geographies and environments. “In Australia, camels have been introduced in the outback and so we have grumph. Unsurprisingly I haven’t come across any sound for a camel in the US or UK.”
Sound, language, and sensation also play off each other in the condition known as synesthesia, in which a person’s senses are joined and triggered: a certain sound can produce a certain color, a certain smell can produce a certain sound, etc. Synesthesia seems to affect musicians more than any other artistic populace, and it tends to be chromosynesthesia, where sounds involuntarily trigger the sensation of colors. Margaret Farrell recently wrote an examination of the color purple in pop music. “Purple appears every decade in pop music and acquires subtle shifts in meaning,” she writes. For Charli XCX, “purple pop music” signifies “moody, emotional and rich.” Prince was the personification of purple, making music that was both royal and sexual. “The color is linked to queerness—a mix of both pink and blue, an androgynous color that represents both and something new simultaneously— and finding alternative forms of gender identity.”
I think I have a form of synesthesia—it’s often self-diagnosed, isn’t it?—but it’s tied to particular sonic effects, not notes. For me, the sound of a phaser, flanger, or chorus effect is purple. Nirvana’s music often sounds purple to me, and so does the music of My Bloody Valentine and Cocteau Twins, because they use those effects in their songs. I see a swirling purple, veering between queasy and dreamy. Certain distortions can also trigger pleasing texture sensations in my mouth, which maybe explains why I love garage rock and punk so much: I can literally taste it.