The Great Book of Music

...through the articulations of the sounds produced by them. These sounds are distinguished in speech through the assistance of the organs of the mouth and the cavities of the throat.

The origin of the driving force that creates the sounds forming a word is the human desire for communication original: "dafi' al-raghba... fi al-tafahum," the psychological urge to be understood by others as the root of language.. When the air pushed from the chest collides with the vocal cords vocal cords: "mazamir al-hanjara," literally "the flutes of the larynx," reflecting an early anatomical understanding of the throat as a wind instrument., the mouth organs, and the throat cavities, it produces distinct sounds that the listener perceives as expressions of the meanings of speech.

In itself, when a word is spoken out of this simple desire without any further aim, its effect on the listener does not go beyond alerting their consciousness to the intended meaning. In this state, the timing between the movements of the sounds is ordinary, following the habitual patterns of everyday language. However, when these sounds are arranged in a different proportion—such as by prolonging the duration of the vowels vowels: "al-huruf al-musawwata," literally "sounding letters," referring to the voiced breath sounds that carry pitch. and varying the syllables through extensions of high and low pitches original: "al-hidda wa-al-thiqal," literally "sharpness and heaviness," the standard medieval terms for high and low frequency.—and are heard in a way that delights the ear, they become more stimulating and have a greater impact on the listener.

It is self-evident that delivering a word in this extraordinary manner requires the cooperation of both the senses and the power of imagination to create a type of measured rhythm measured rhythm: "al-iqa' al-mawzun," the structural beat or meter that organizes musical time.. This rhythm prevents the components from falling apart during the prolongation, compression, or shortening original: "al-madd wa-al-tayy wa-al-qasr," terms borrowed from Arabic prosody (the study of poetic meter) describing how syllables are stretched or condensed to fit a musical or poetic frame. of the vowels within a melody. Therefore, it is clear that the melodic style is characterized by the pleasing manipulation of a word's structure, producing it as a melodic, rhythmic vocal composition.

The Arabic language in particular, and Eastern languages in general, are distinguished by a specific type of phonetic connection...