Biomusicology
An article in the New York Times today about biomusicology: "But music has a power unique among forms of human communication: it can teach itself. Gradually over repeated hearings, without the use of a dictionary or any reference to the world outside, music shows how it is to be understood. The listener begins to hear patterns, repeated motifs and changes in meter and realizes that something is happening, that sounds have punctuation, that phrases are being manipulated, transformed and recombined.
"Gradually, the listener gains a form of knowledge without ever referring to anything outside the music. Sounds create their own context. They begin to make sense. Similar processes with varying richness and power take place in all forms of music, which is why it is much easier to understand another culture's music than another culture's language."
It's also how we learn language. We had a point driven home during Solomon's sixth month baby visit. He understands language -- at least, what language is being spoken to him -- by its musical cadence. He doesn't understand the words, but he knows the difference between English and Spanish and others.
There's another article from a few months back that I think I linked here as well which argued just how music was the core of language. So, reductio ad absurdum, language equals math.
Or something like that.