Could Rocky’s musical language in Project Hail Mary actually work?

Linguists explain how a language built from musical notes could convey complex meaning and even support conversation

Rachel Feltman: For Scientific American ’s Science Quickly , I’m Rachel Feltman. One quick heads up: This episode features some spoilers for Project Hail Mary .

If there’s one thing that the many, many viewers of the movie Project Hail Mary seem to agree on, it’s that the alien character known as Rocky is an absolute delight. In the adaptation of Andy Weir’s novel about a biologist-turned-teacher who finds himself burdened with a mission to save Earth, translation software gives Rocky a charmingly wry voice with which to communicate with the main character, Ryland Grace.

But while Rocky’s text-to-speech persona is used to great dramatic and comedic effect in the film, his native language is also worth a listen. This complex, music-based communication system wasn’t treated as an afterthought. Two experts in the field of constructed language actually, ya know, constructed his language. So what does it take to communicate using musical notes, and how would Rocky’s mother tongue actually work?

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Here to tell us all about it is Allison Parshall, an associate editor for mind and brain at Scientific American .

Feltman: So we are gonna talk about musical languages. We talk about music and language with you a lot, but today is different.

Parshall: [Laughs.] I’m always here for the same thing. But today is a different—it is quite literally musical languages. And I actually wanna start with a challenge for you. So I want you to pretend that you and I are in some sort of weird situation where we can only communicate using a piano. We can’t talk or write or use gestures or make any faces. We can just press the keys on the piano. Could we create a language that would allow us to carry a conversation like the one we’re having right now? Could we do that, and how would you do it?

Feltman: Well, I will say that I’m very excited for this Knives Out sequel that we’re going to be in together. Um, I guess my first move would be, like, literally using the letters, corresponding to the notes, in the scale as a code. You could probably get more letters in there if you made it more of a, like, alphanumerical thing. I think it could be done. I don’t think I could have a very good conversation that way, and I think it would make me mad to try.

Parshall: Right? Like I guess you could take the entire keyboard and give each letter of the English alphabet a note and then just play through. But that would be pretty time intensive if you think about it. Like just spelling out the word face, F-A-C-E. Like I can say “face” in milliseconds. It would take me quite a long time to go through as some sort of code.

So no human language operates like this based off of pitch alone. Like pitch is an important part of how we talk.