Jason Hutchens: solresol people

This section contains the email and WWW addresses of everyone who has expressed interest in Solresol, along with a short blurb extracted from their email describing the nature of their interest. Hopefully this will help speed our research and discovery process!

Paul Collins

I only started learning about it a couple weeks ago, and most of Baker's page was already shut down -- I couldn't find his dictionary or anything. It was a pleasant surprise to find that it had been saved!

Email: paulcllins@aol.com
WWW: http://users.aol.com/paulcllins/

Suzette Haden Elgin

I once was asked by a group of linguists and medical professionals to construct a musical language for their use in research with aphasics. I began the project, but very quickly discovered numerous problems; I won't bore you with details. Many years later, when I was following email postings on the Conlang (constructed language) list, I saw a mention of Solresol, and I've kept my eye open for any material on the subject ever since. (And a story of mine about the use of a musical language in aphasia is in the current "Space Opera" anthology published recently by Scarborough and McCaffrey, if science fiction interests you; nothing theoretical there, just a general overview aimed at the public, where there is widespread ignorance of the fact that many people who have lost their ability to speak retain the ability to hum or sing -- information I feel should be known to everyone.)

Email: ocls@ipa.net

Bruce Koestner

I have been working for quite some time on my own constructed musical language of Eaiea. Unlike Solresol, Eaiea uses all twelve notes of the chromatic scale and is tuned to standard pitch. The Eaiea language is located at: http://members.aol.com/Eaiea/Eaiea.html.

It was long after I had been working on Eaiea that I discovered Greg Baker's web site on Solresol. I was glad to see that somebody else had developed a practical concept for using combinations of pitches to form words.

Now that Solresol is back on the web with a fairly reasonable dictionary, I am hoping to include the language in the composition that I am working on.

Email: Eaiea@aol.com

John Schilke

It was quite a surprise for me to learn tonight about your web-page on Solresol. For about the last 20 years I have been slowly piecing together some meagre information about Sudre and his invention, which I'd be more than happy to share with you. I have it in hard copy, but would be willing to copy what I have and mail it to you.

For introduction's sake, I'm a middle-aged family physician in Oregon (USA), with a bent for languages, both natural and constructed.

Email: schilkej@ohsu.EDU

Zane Gilley

I am thinking of writing my own musical language, and I believe it gets around the problem of word breaks for Solresol and absolute pitch for Eaiea...

My idea is for the 'letters' of the language not be the notes themselves but the intervals between the notes (therefore fixing the problem with absolute pitch). A word is terminated with the same note that it started on so that the sum of the intervals for a word is Zero. The interval following a word will declare the part of speech to follow. I am thinking of using the intervals to define the vocabulary and the meter of a word to define its case,number and gender for nouns and adjectives or the tense,person and number for verbs..

Email: zane_gilley@mailcity.com