Leos Janacek was the early 20th century version of Charles Spearin–check out The Happiness Project if you’re not familiar with it already–according to Jonathan Secora Pearl in his article titled Eavesdropping with a Master: Leos Janacek and the Music of Speech. Janacek apparently transcribed the speech of those around him into regular music notation. I did not know this, despite him being one of my favorite composers. I also didn’t expect to come across this information on Language Log, a linguistics blog.

Mark Liberman’s take on it seems to be that Janacek was simply fooling himself into thinking that speech contains discrete pitches as opposed to continuous slides, citing pitch-tracking software and Joshua Steele–whose 1775 essay related to the subject is awesomely available in full on Google Books. My hope is that he wasn’t naive but was simply trying to create a rough approximation of what he heard in speech. Afterall, Janacek was no scientist–notwithstanding his work in ethnomusicology. And music notation is only an approximation of actual music just as writing is an approximation of spoken language, if I’m not mistaken.

In any case, I’ll be reading through Steele’s essay and Pearl’s article as this seems to be combining all my favorite things. I’m anxious to find out just how much these transcriptions affected Janacek’s music as I’ve thought about incorporating this sort of thing into my own music–and I certainly have a large enough database of speech recordings to get started with.