Conlangery Podcast Musiclanging with Jonathan
Dec 16, 2025
Jonathan (Lavuna Langs) is a musician and conlanger who builds musical constructed languages like Stefa and Amnenas. He talks about treating pitch as phonemes and designing a 12-note melodic vocabulary. He describes quoting melodies as words, exploring just intonation and drifting dissonance, and rendering precise pitches with code and synthesis.
AI Snips
Chapters
Books
Transcript
Episode notes
From Scripts To Musical Conlangs
- Jonathan learned conlanging first through scripts and a collaborative language with his sister.
- He later combined that interest with lifelong musical training to create musical conlangs.
Pitch As The Phonology
- Stefa encodes meaning purely as sequences of pitches within one chromatic octave, treating pitch like phonemes.
- Jonathan left rhythm, timbre, and register free so composers can musicalize the text later.
Words As Musical Quotes
- Jonathan builds Stefa words by quoting short musical snippets from familiar composers, then transposes them to fit keys.
- This makes many Stefa words sound like tiny musical quotations aligned to common keys.
