About this episode
Elan Barenholtz discusses the nature of language, its development, and its relationship with music and art.
How did language develop its rich, complex properties and what led to your epiphany about language’s nature? Elan framed a recent realization that language may possess an internal, self-generative structure revealed by large language models. He argued that modern language models work by learning statistical relations in sequences rather than by possessing external world knowledge or reference. Elan proposed that human speech may be language “running on its own,” with the speaker acting mainly as a prompt to an internal informational system. He reported conducting computational and empirical work over the past ~18 months to test and develop this intuition about language. Elan suggested language likely evolved from preexisting biological sequence-generating mechanisms rather than appearing de novo in humans. He proposed music as a possibly purer autogenerative domain that may have preceded or informed early language forms. EMIC analysis (emic) is used to derive internal musical rules from large samples of transcribed songs to enable generative composition that insiders can validate. Generative analysis aims to produce compositions that are stylistically authentic based on derived…
People in this episode
Host: Karen Wong
Guest: Elan Barenholtz
Topics covered
- language development
- music
- art
- generative composition
- statistical relations
- biological mechanisms
Keywords
- language
- music
- generative analysis
- statistical relations
- EMIC analysis
- Arca Musarithmica
- biological mechanisms
Mentioned in this episode
Books & works: Arca Musarithmica
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