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MUSIC, MEMORY AND ACTION
ENGLISH
Table of Content
Introduction
Music has long been an integral part of human civilization and, more immediately, our everyday life. I think it is safe for me to think that everyone of us enjoys one type of music or another. We hum to tunes that catch our fancy. We sing in the shower. We invest part of our income on musical products. We take our friends or business associates to sing karaoke. We go on the web to download musical files. And, we sing on many occasions: when we are happy, when we are sad, or when we are simply in the mood for it. In short, music is a lot more than just a means for entertainment or relaxation; it also is a form of expression and a vital means for human communication.
I have suggested to you before, as have Lisa and her various guests in their lively conversations, that popular culture is a good source of information and ideas for improving upon your Action English. As you saw in Lisa's recent programs, popular music has been highlighted as one such popular culture that you can tap into for this purpose. For example, you can learn certain expressions from popular music lyrics. And there is a wealth of this kind of information on the Internet.
But how and to what extent can popular music be used to improve upon your Action English? And, perhaps more fundamentally, how and why can music be used as a means for studying language?
In this column, I would like to share with you some conceptual and historical backgrounds on this subject. The following discussion is meant to give you a broader understanding of the relationship between music and language as well as the relationship between memory and cultural information.
Orality and Literacy
According to symbolic anthropology, what defines us as human has been our ability to symbolize through the use of language and various other symbol systems. Language gives us a tool to think about things, to conceptualize, and to articulate and impart information. We have been able to construct and maintain human society because language allows us to communicate with others.
But our understanding of language has been overwhelmingly biased by our emphasis on the written words. In the West, for example, the study of language has been heavily biased toward the study of the written aspects of language, such as lexicology and literature. This literate bias of language study is indeed a peculiar bias given the fact that humans have an "oral history" that is so much longer than their "literate history."
We may also consider these facts: There are over 3,000 and some languages in the world today. But only 106 of them are committed to writing and just about 78 of them have what we call literature. As far as we can imagine, while human beings use all of their senses to communicate among themselves, oral speech must have been a dominant means for human interaction for many millions of years. But even though it has had a much longer history than its literate counterpart, the cultural significance of oral language has often been ignored.
Worse, our literate bias has all sorts of negative social implications or ramifications. For example, you cannot get into college (or good college) or get your hands on any scholarship if you do not have high marks on those so-called "standardized" college entrance exams or other similar tests such as the likes of SAT, GRE, GMAT and LSAT. These exams are valuation methods for measuring literacy-based "intelligence" and they ignore what can be considered as "oral intelligence."
Moreover, we use terms such as "illiterate" to describe people who are oral in their orientation simply because they have not acquired literacy. If you critically look at the term "illiterate" or "illiteracy" in Chinese, "wen-mang," you should sense how negatively our literacy-biased society has been labelling oral people and the kind of injustice that has been done to them. While oral people helped bring us all to the present time, we literate folks have a tendency of underestimating the intelligence of our oral ancestors and contemporaries.
By the same token, our bias toward the literate aspect of language has also blinded us to the extremely rich oral traditions and cultures of many people in the world. In fact, for a very long time in the intellectual history of the human specie, our quest for understanding our past has always been defined by our "documented past." We rarely "listen" to our history. This is a major reason why more and more scholars around the world, including such prominent figures in the field as Milman Parry and Walter Ong, have begun work in the study of the oral aspects (or "orality") of language and, more generally, oral cultures and traditions.
Primary Oral Culture
What is known as "primary oral culture" is a society "untouched" by writing. All the cultures existing before writing was invented can also be conceived as primary oral cultures. Of course, for one reason or another, many people living in literate societies remain oral in their cultural orientation. (As you notice by now, due to my respect for them and my own theoretical and cultural conviction, I refrain from using such labels as "illiterate" or "illiteracy" to describe oral people.)
Two of the major questions that scholars in the field of "orality and literacy study" are concerned with are: What do primary oral people regard as information? And, how do primary oral people "record" information since they do not have any writing system to help them? Or, if I may turn the questions to you, what would you do in regard to information if you do not have writing as a recording device?
If we look at them carefully, these are not very easy questions to deal with because literacy has already been so ingrained in our individual, as well as collective consciousness. It is very hard for us to conceptualize the mind-set of primary oral people. For example, when someone says to us "I like you" or "whatsoever," there exists in our mind's eyes the visual image of the written words "I like you" or "whatsoever." If someone says this to you in Chinese, you would then have these words in Chinese characters "running across" your mind's eyes. But to primary oral people, there is NO visual reference of the sounds "I like you" or "whatsoever" because they have NO writing. Language in oral societies does not have a visual dimension. This is one reason why it is very difficult for us to understand how primary oral people construct and retain information.
Memory in Oral Culture
Memory plays a vital role in the cultural and informational life of primary oral people or people with no literacy. This is why oral people use many things and activities to help them remember: cave paintings, drawings, tying knots, special arrangements of artifacts, architecture, music, oral recitation (such as epic poems), rituals, to name just a few.
If you pay closer attention to the above list of things oral people do to remember information, you would see two distinct categories: one of them is visual (e.g., paintings and objects) and the other one is aural (e.g., music, oral recitation, and proverbs). While visual aids can easily help us remember things by showing us what it is that we are remembering, aural aids require some special attention and techniques. It takes more for us to use oral speech as a memory aid because it does not give us any visual reference.
Put in another way, What are oral or aural references? How do oral utterances help people remember? What kind of techniques do primary people employ to remember things through such oral utterance as songs, epic poems, and other forms of oral recitation? Or, what do song and music, epic poem, and poetry have in common?
All of these forms of oral recitation are structured by a metrical system and they all have a distinct set of internal rhymes. In other words, oral cultures have tended to rely heavily on such mnemonic devices (memory aids) as folks songs, epic poems, and other forms of oral recitation because their simple, repeatable patterns allow people to remember things more easily. And, to further help themselves remember cultural information, oral people need to repeat what they know in songs, in poems, and other oral mnemonic devices such as proverbs over and over again. Otherwise, they could forget their information over time.
This helps explain why oral people have tended to be "repetitive" in saying what they know. I have seen a lot of inter-generational conflicts in many families. Many young people, especially those who are literate, have a great deal of mis-understanding or even negative attitude toward the fact that their oral parents or grandparents "repeat the same old things over and over again."
To the literate young, what their oral parents or grandparents do is overly redundant and therefore wasteful of time; the repetition of this life story back in the old village or that moral episode is boring. Literate people do not have to use oral memory to hold on to information because they can write things down. (Of course, this also explains why prose is the dominant form of writing style in literate societies and literate people have very bad memory.) But to oral people, repetition and recitation are vital to their cultural and informational life.
Related to the above is one of the two key questions posted earlier: What do primary oral people regard as information? Well, I am quite sure you know the answer to this question by now. Since it takes time, devotion, or otherwise a lot of social and mental resources to remember information, people in primary oral culture are very careful in what to remember. For the most part, they would choose to remember only information that is important to their social, cultural, and personal survival to the extent that it is relevant to their own lifeworld.
This is why oral societies have tended to be "conservative" in the sense that they have to conserve information. This is also why they have tended to be "traditional" in their cultural outlook to the extent that they cannot afford to change too rapidly. And, this is why oral cultures have tended to have a lot of customs, rituals, festivities, and things or activities that are communal and easily repeatable in nature. All of these are meant to help people in these cultures remember information and pass information on from one generation to the next.
Learning Action English Through Music
As I suggested in passing above, since we literate folks have an effective means (written language) to record information, we have lost most of our memory capability. This is why many of us believe that we can use some extra help in memory and music can be a wonderful tool for this purpose.
I still remember some of the nursery rhymes my grandmom used to hum to me when I was very small. To me, they are more than some distraction or pacifier my grandmom used to entertain me when I was in distress. To begin with, those nursery rhymes help me remember my grandmom. They also help me remember some of the things that were endearing to my grandmom's memory of "the old village" back in Mainland China: the fishermen who rowed the fishing boats; the ginger candies; the games children played; and so on. These are some of the cultural information my grandmom passed on to me. And, of course, those nursery rhymes also taught me how to speak; they were my "beginning courses" in Cantonese, just as a lot of the Mandarin songs to hum to helped me pick up my Mandarin.
My experience of what my grandmom's nursery rhymes have done for me (in initiating me into the world of Cantonese through music) has convinced me that singing karaoke can be just as effective a means for people to learn, acquire, or improve upon their foreign language ability. True, not all of us can sing. I can confess to you that I am a horrible singer. In all honesty, I cannot remember if my grandmom was a good signer either. But of course the point here is not about the extent to which we can sing well. Rather, the point to stress here is that singing gives you an enjoyable and relaxing experience as it gives you a "memorable" structure to retain and enlarge your vocabulary in, say, English.
But there is yet another very important issue to address here. While music or singing gives us a rhythmic structure to better retain information, it does not guarantee that we can retain just about any information we put into this structure. This is why I highlighted for you in the last section that primary oral people have tended to remember information that is important or relevant to their own social, cultural, and personal lifeworld and survival. In other words, you will remember better if the words and ideas in the English songs are those words and ideas relevant to you.
And I believe this is a crucial point to stress at this juncture: You can learn and improve upon your Action English skills by listening to and familiarizing yourself with English-language popular music or songs. You can do this in many ways: e.g., by listening to music in English you download from the Internet or with your personal walkman; by singing karaoke in English either along or with your friends; and so on.
Choosing Music for Action English: Some Guidelines
But you have to be cautious about what kind of English-language music or songs to use for this purpose. As with everything else with popular media, there are good lyrics (or language) in popular music and there are no-so-good or simply bad lyrics (or language) in popular music. In addition, most if not all of the English-language songs you listen to come from foreign countries. In other words, what the songs are about may not be entirely relevant to your own experience. In short, therefore, you should be very careful in choosing lyrics that make good sense to you. Here are some guidelines for your consideration:
1. How and to what extent does the song's content expand upon what you already know about the subject?
2. How and to what extend does the song's lyric add to your existing vocabulary or knowledge in expressions in English?
3. How and to what extend does it relate to your lifeworld or experience to the extent that it can help you remember the words or expressions?
4. How and to what extend is it a clear articulation of the subject being sung about?
In addition, you may also consider asking yourself the question: How and to what extent is the song (or its lyrics) memorable to you and WHY? I believe it will help you more if you know why certain songs are memorable to you because you can then know what work for you and what does not. With this knowledge (of what work for you and WHY), you can more wisely choose the kind of music to best serve your purpose.
Let me end this discussion on a note that may be of some interest to you: Find some tunes that you enjoy the most and fill in your own lyrics with Action English expressions you are working on. Action English can be "music to your ears."
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