A Solresol Library

October 18, 2024 - 6 minutes read - 1071 words

I’ve been wondering: What would a library look like in a culture that still communicated its most important cultural institutions through music versus prose?¹ What if the language of music were to define how that culture organized knowledge so that speaking (singing?) of the organization of knowledge imparted some metadata about the knowledge itself? What if we crossed solresol with the Dewey decimal system?

This idea was inspired by my playing, this past Spring, "Horizon: Forbidden West.“² With its superb world-building and the graphics/audio capabilities of the PlayStation 5, the development team at Guerilla games helps us imagine a world where music is a dominant and uniting cultural thread:³

The game’s heroine, Aloy, enters in the Utaru tribe’s home village of “Plainsong” to beautiful choral music.

So, what would a library organized by sound look like? I think we can blend two real-world ideas to come to a conjecture: solresol and the Dewey decimal system.

Quick recap:

Solresol: Made famous in “The Sound of Music,” the “Universal Language” has seven sounds (you know them from the musical). The sounds have an associated color, C-Major musical tone, glyph, and even hand gesture (you saw “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” right?). Primary creator François Sudre in 1866 CE
Dewey Decimal System: A system of library organization where top-level integers (0-9 * 10²) that could be sub-specified with the tens and ones place. Even further subdivision was possible by joining with . e.g. 750.1.3. Primary creator Melvil Dewey ~ 1876 CE

In solresol, particles of sound (syllables) have a grammar associated with them:

Words of syllable length 4 fall into various themed categories…For example, words beginning with ‘sol’, which include no repeating syllables, have meanings related to arts or sciences

So that means we have 7³ unique combinations for arts and sciences. Given that there are two primary sub-buckets, we should use the second syllable to differentiate between an “art” or “science”. That would be that within each of those two buckets, 7² unique values are possible.⁴ Thus:

Painting is ‘sol-la-do-la’
Sculpture is ‘sol-la-mi-fa’
Chemistry is ‘sol-re-sol-sol’

In addition, there are other rules that dictate syllables’ topical relationships: ’la’ is be related to commerce; ’re’ is related to the domestic space. Now whether one agrees that domesticity (’re’) is somehow related to ‘Chemistry’ is up for debate, of course. But the big picture is that the “call sound” versus “call number” contains some bit of its own metadata.

Compare Dewey:

Painting is 750
Sculpture is 731-ish
Chemistry is around 540

This scheme feels very arbitrary. It’s a system for generating unique numbers and mapping them to a topical area. There’s nothing about the component ideas that build the topic. One could not look at Dewey and infer how to build a building that embodies the information architecture of the library. It has no logos short of a two-column table.

By way of comparison, the idea of syllables of words telling you their “general idea” by successive narrowing of sets of possible values is a fascinating idea. It means that each syllable serves to narrow the domain of the word by successive set definitions.

This has echoes in…

set theory or type theory as applied to programming languages (Hi TypeScript, OCaml, Haskell)
the order of presenting significant bit first or last (big-endian or little-endian) in computer memory architecture
information theory pertaining to handling noise: if the most important syllable comes first, one can get a ballpark approximation on the gist of the message even if noise renders the last syllable inaudible.

One could imagine taking the logos or algorithm of solresol topic naming and using it to create a recursive architecture for a library.

One enters the library and encounters a nexus. There are 7 halls ahead, each with an associated color (and ambient tone?). Any given hall leads to a nexus.
In the next nexus, there are 7 halls ahead, each with an associated color (and ambient tone?). Any given hall leads to a nexus.
Repeat 2
Repeat 2
Enter a final room full of books on the topic

To visit ‘chemistry’ then, we’d take the 5th hallway, the second, the fifth, and the fifth. Assuming we knew the top level rules (‘sol’ means arts and science; ’la’ industry and commerce) we’d know whether to take the 5th hall for chemistry but the 6th hall for e.g. Das Kapital.

A society like this offers many interesting storytelling opportunities:

Imagine a mystery set in this world where 3 of the 4 particles are present – the characters would know the gist, but not the final idea. With apologies to Umberto Eco, “In the Name of the Res?”
Or imagine a treasure hunt where one accumulates sufficient particles to find the location of a critical artifact. With apologies to Dan Brown, “The DaVinci Sol?”
A dialogue where characters say one thing but intone it to mean something else. She says: “I love you, too” but on the tones of ’re-fa-mi-do’ (die)

How humans encode knowledge in sound, song, gesture, architecture, walks to help make our ephemeral memories lasting is truly one of the most fascinating studies I know.

Footnotes

Oh come on, Westerners, you do realize that our foundational cultural documents are the Iliad and Odyssey, poetry set to be accompanied by harp? That’s music
The game images a future after a technical apocalypse where humanity reverts to tribal level civilization while the legacy footprints of the ancestor world – our future – lay all about in plain view. It’s a richly-built world that takes culture, linguistics, and material culture into account in constructing its narrative
One of the many tribes encountered in the game is a peaceful agrarian society that lives harmoniously with plants and the natural rhythms of seed, young growth, maturity, senescence, and death. They are called the Utaru (in an area that seems like Utah, given their origin myths). Fascinatingly, their culture is defined by music and natural agricultural cycles. Their council of elders is, in fact, called the Chorus
It’s hard for me to imagine that those 49 degrees of freedom would have seemed sufficient even in the 19^th century when this scheme was developed – but there are ways around it.⁵
These are the same questions around IP networking (how many degrees of freedom until we run out of addresses? IPV4 moved to IPV6 to support the staggering number of things we have chosen to put on the internet)