Music and Musicology. Music and Language. To increase the understanding of the social function of music it is necessary first to examine the relation of music to language. Both music and language employ sound as their medium. Both communicate something from a sound maker to a sound hearer. This “something” is, in all the higher as well as in most so-called primitive cultures, an elaborately stylized selection of sound material which as assumed by both the makers and the hearers of the sound to have communicable content and social value.