The Magic Pantry

Another historic article, from the 1990′s. Of course, these days you’d just look it up in Wikepedia, but that didn’t start until 2001.

Introduction

My fascination with Solresol began when I recently watched “Close Encounters of the Third Kind”. My PhD research is focused on Language Processing, and I found the concept of a musical language interesting. I wondered whether Spielberg had made the whole thing up, or whether such a language existed.

I read all of the reviews on the Internet Movie Database, and I was surprised to find that none of them mentioned the musical language at all. Strange, given the part it plays in the movie.

Coincidentally, I picked up the “Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Language” the day after watching the film, and read a paragraph on an Artificial Language called Solresol which uses musical notes as elementary symbols. My fascination had begun.

A web search turned up scant information. The only web page dedicated to Solresol didn’t exist anymore, and its author, Greg Baker, had changed jobs. After a few email exchanges with his former work colleagues, I tracked Greg down. Most of the information in these pages is based on the email he sent me.

History

Solresol, or “Langue Musicale Universelle”, was invented at the beginning of the 19th century by Jean Francois Sudre (1787-1864), a music master who realized that the seven-note diatonic scale could provide elemental symbols for a universal language.

The French versions of these seven symbols are do, re, mi, fa, sol, la and si, although in this document I use so in preference to sol, and ti instead of si. So, in truth, Julie Andrews should have sung:-

Do, a deer, a female deer
Re, a drop of golden sun
Mi, a name I call myself
Fa, a long long way to run
Sol, the closest star to Earth
La, the note that follows sol
Si, the Italian word for “yes”
Which brings us back to Do!

The words in Solresol are short melodies. I’ll represent words as a sequence of characters taken from the set {D, R, M, F, S, L, T}. For example, the word solresol will be written as SRS, which corresponds to the three notes so, re and so. The word itself translates as “language”.

Solresol may be spoken, sung, whistled or played on a musical instrument. It may be written compactly, simply by representing each symbol by its first letter. It may be signed, which is reminiscent of “Close Encounters” yet again; it may even be represented with the seven colours of the rainbow.

As with all a priori languages (languages which use an invented set of elements which stand for basic concepts and are grouped into supposedly universal logical classifications, based on scientific and philosophical issues), Solresol is difficult to learn. Even so, it became very popular in the mid-19th century, and won several prizes.

It was so popular, in fact, that the French army toyed with the idea of using Solresol as the official means of communication when on the battlefield. This is presumably due to the fact that pure tones may be broadcast over further distances than articulated speech, and the confusion it would cause the enemy!

Design

The words in Solresol consist of sequences of notes. Sudre planned to use seven words of one note, 49 words of two notes, 336 words of three notes, 2268 words of four notes, and 9072 words of five notes.

Words need to be separated in some way if they are to be decoded uniquely; for this reason Sudre decided that word boundaries would be denoted with brief pauses. This requirement tends to break up the “melody” in an unpleasant way.

It is also interesting to note that Sudre didn’t use all combinations of three and four notes. It has been suggested that this was intentional, in order to avoid repititious sequences of notes. In fact, in the information I have, only 42 two-note words are defined—the seven repititious ones are omitted.

Combinations of one or two notes form the participles and pronouns, while three-note words are used for the most frequent words. There are seven classes of four note words, called keys, according to the initial note. For example, the key of do contains words which represent the physical and moral aspects of man. Finally, combinations of five notes furnish the names of the three categories: animal, vegetable and mineral.

To allow future expansion, Sudre included an encoding of the letters of the alphabet.

Grammatical categories may be distinguished by the position of an accent over the notes, which means the note should be lengthened to indicate stress. The verb is unstressed throughout, the noun is stressed on the first note, the adjective on the next-to-last, and the adverb on the last. The feminine is also marked by final stress.

The opposite of an idea is often expressed by reversing the order of the notes in a word.

Dictionary

This copy of the Solresol dictionary began with a version sent to me by Greg Baker. I HTMLised it, and converted the representation of Solresol notes to an unambiguous one. I also changed the ordering of the words to Solresol order, which makes their grouping into classes more obvious.

One Note Words

These seven words cover the most frequently used words in the English language.

Two Note Words

Although Sudre planned on using 49 two-note words, this list omits the seven repititious ones. These words form the particles and pronouns.

Three Note Words

Sudre planned on using 336 three note words; this list has only xxx of them. These words are used for common words.

Four Note Words

The four note words are divided into seven classes, called keys, which depend on the initial note of the word. Each class represents some philosophical category. Sudre planned on designing 2268 four note words, although there are only xxx listed here.

Key of Do: Physical and Moral Aspects of Man

Key of Re: Family, Household and Dress

Key of Mi:

Key of Fa:

Key of So:

Key of La: Industry and Commerce

Key of Ti:

Five Note Words

Sudre planned on using 9072 five note words, although there are none known at this stage.

Acknowledgements

Steven Spielberg made Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which got me interested in the idea of a musical language in the first place.

Some information about Solresol was obtained from the Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Language.

Greg Baker was kind enough to pass on to me all the information he had about Solresol, after I found that his web page on the language no longer existed.

My recent work on Solresol has been aided by the information made available by Steven Rice, including his English translation of Boleslas Gajewski’s Grammaire du Solrisol.

John Schilke has mailed me hardcopies of all the information he’s obtained about Solresol in 20 years of searching.