Research in speech and music is always fascinating and rightfully considered a hard science, being that it is interdisciplinary. These proceedings pertain to the International Workshop on Language, Music, and Computing, held in St. Petersburg, Russia, from April 20 to 22, 2015. The workshop primarily focused on the influence of musical ability in language acquisition and vice versa. It also focused on automatic classification and modeling of linguistic and musical knowledge.

The proceedings are divided into five parts. The first part, “General Questions,” briefs the readers with the state of the art of research in speech and music in the Russian context. It contains two papers that study the relationship between language and music with special emphasis on syntax, morphology, and logic.

The second part, “Music and Language in Education,” contains three interesting papers that examine the relationship between music and language in education. For example, one paper claims that the musical trait is an “advanced human accomplishment” that cannot be attributed merely to maturity or musical evolution. Another paper shows how features like timbre, dynamics, and so on can reveal hidden aspects of syntax and semantics. Yet another paper shows how pattern thinking and reflective writing can assist a composer.

The third part describes corpus studies of language and music. This part also contains three papers. One paper discusses the corpus of Russian text in music annotation. The problem of Brazilian Portuguese pronominal verbs is addressed in the next paper. The third paper examines the typical everyday spoken Russian that includes regularly occurring singing behavior.

The fourth part addresses notation-related problems. I found this part very absorbing though it has only two papers. While one paper suggests a new technique that claims to be an improvement over Braille musicography (the idea is to use a combination of nine raised dots), the other paper introduces a novel digital audiovisual method to combat the intriguing notational problem in Indian music. However, I found two incomplete references given in the further reading section in the paper on Indian music (refs. 6 and 13).

The final part includes three more papers that highlight some innovative ideas about using the theories and mechanisms of linguistics in music research.

In addition to the absorbing papers in Part 4, which I have summarized above, below is a brief summary of some of the other interesting papers that the reader may like to study.

Part 1, paper 2: This paper shows that the meaning of a known melody is derived from its cognitive frame, which is a part of its global image, while that of an unknown melody depends purely on its emotional impact on listeners.

Part 2, paper 3: If studying music, especially classical music, helps us in learning other subjects, this paper explores the possibility of the reverse: that studying other subjects can help us compose better music.

Part 5, paper 1: Songs fall under the category of composite art where lyrics and tune and their interaction are crucial. This paper brings out the structural interaction between poetry and music components in a song using time series analysis, with stress index being used to explain the poetry component and pitch/duration dynamics being used to describe the musical counterpart.

All in all, all 13 revised selected papers are worth reading. The proceedings would definitely benefit both postgraduate students and researchers of linguistics, musicology, and computing. I would definitely recommend it for a scientific library.