Tuesday, July 19, 2011

Melodies

Saw a black cat trotting along the road yesterday, carrying a... uh, [sork] so big that the tail was dragging on the ground, it was at least twice the size of the cat's head. Show off.

Listening to Korean radio through shoutcast.com. Partly because normal radio is boring, partly because I like music where I don't understand the words because then I don't get ticked off at stupid lyrics, and partly because listening to it passively teaches me the sounds and melodies of the language. It's also cool to have a normal music radio channel that plays *only* songs in the native language. How many Swedish-exclusive music channels are there? (Not that I'd listen to them.) I've listened to French radio before, but a lot of the music is the same as ours and in English. While it's cool to have like a "universal" language between European countries, I guess that native languages get sidelined. I'm usually not so opposed to that, but it's a tragedy when it comes to music, really. Every language is like it's own instrument. Ever listen to duets by people from Sweden/Norway/Denmark? Chorusing together but in their own language, it sounds awesome.

So if every language is it's own instrument, what instrument would that be? Like, Norwegian would be the ukulele to the Swedish guitar, Italian would be drums and Russian, I think, like one of those stringed square things that lie down and you can play chords on... not the Asian ones, darn it what are they called...



2 comments:

Kat said...

Can't remember the name either, but my grandfather used to play one. It's a really odd instrument, because you can put the notes sheet under the strings, and just strum the strings as marked...

Kat said...

Actually, I think it was a Kantele, or possibly a Zither - they're kinda similar.