Solresol is a unique Artificial Language; its seven-symbol alphabet is based on the diatonic musical scale, so "words" are actually short melodies---they may be written, spoken, sung, whistled, played on an instrument or signed. The language itself is obscure; I've designed these Web pages to encourage interest.
| Introduction | My fascination with Solresol began when I recently watched "Close Encounters of the Third Kind". My PhD research is focused on Language Processing, and I found the concept of a musical language interesting... |
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| History | Solresol, or "Langue Musicale Universelle", was invented at the beginning of the 19th century by Jean Francois Sudre, a music master who realized that the seven-note diatonic scale could provide elemental symbols for a universal language... |
| Design | The words in Solresol consist of sequences of notes. Sudre planned to use seven words of one note, 49 words of two notes, 336 words of three notes, 2268 words of four notes, and 9072 words of five notes... |
| Dictionary | This copy of the Solresol dictionary began with a version sent to me by Greg Baker. I HTMLised it, converted the representation of Solresol notes to an unambiguous one, and changed the ordering of the words... |
| 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... |
Steven Spielberg made Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which got me interested in the idea of a musical language in the first place.
Some information about Solresol was obtained from the Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Language.
Greg Baker was kind enough to pass on to me all the information he had about Solresol, after I found that his web page on the language no longer existed.
My recent work on Solresol has been aided by the information made available by Steven Rice, including his English translation of Boleslas Gajewski's Grammaire du Solrisol.
John Schilke has mailed me hardcopies of all the information he's obtained about Solresol in 20 years of searching.