Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis

“Music psychology has been busy looking at the ways in which music might be similar to language, but Richman, Tannen, and others might be understood to be asking the inverse question, when is language processed musically? This question has been examined in terms of beat structure and intonation, but it might also be considered in terms of repetition structure: highly repetitive forms of language, such as chants and nursery rhymes, veer away from the typical syntactic and semantic modes of understanding speech, and toward modes of comprehension that are more characteristically musical—emotive, social, and holistic.”
― Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis, On Repeat: How Music Plays the Mind

“A gambit that was unusual and highly charged at one time (say, the diminished seventh at the start of the nineteenth century) can come to seem ordinary and ineffective after repeated use (say, the diminished seventh by the end of the nineteenth century).”
― Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis, On Repeat: How Music Plays the Mind