I was thinking about how music and language are alike and yet different, and this is the train of thought that came to me. We might think of music as structuring time. Music exists in time, and moves through time by changing pitch, volume, tempo, rhythm, and timbre. By combining different pitches, chords are created which modulate through time. A beat is established – a grid against which tempo and rhythm occur –variations of pitch, structured in time, creating melodies. And every pitch has a timbre, a sound quality, like the difference between a cello and a saxophone, and when two or more instruments are combined, as with a symphony orchestra, there are many variations of sound quality. All of this is produced and received by thinking and feeling creatures whose experience of life is temporal: we live and act and feel in time. We desire, fear and plan for what we see coming over the horizons of our lives, we are excited or relaxed, which are ways of f...