SO. I have a musical conlang[1] that is spoken by some gods on the planet Chamkra, several thousand years in the future
For regular humans to speak this gods' language, they have to sing and also play an instrument or two to be able to speak it properly. At the bare level of understandability (we'll get more to that later).
GENERALLY, for a human to speak the god's music: A voice for melody, and an instrument for rhythm and/or for harmony or polyphonic melody (just fancy way of saying "playing another melody alongside the other one; I'm just going to call 'the other polyphonic melody' the harmony for ease of reading).
Generally, it's either done by one person or two, rarely more since getting to the gods in greater numbers can be a dangerous journey. (Even this only allows them to speak the BASICS of the language, nothing complicated)
- Two people: One singer, who plays harmony, while someone else plays percussion. Mismatching the percussion to the melody & harmony causes way less misunderstandings than if the melody and harmony contradict each other 'grammatically' [1]. Melody & harmony (or second melody) are more essential parts of the language, more BASIC. Together they form the bare bones of a word.
- One person: A singer doing harmony as well as rhythm. Think of what one might do with a piano or keyboard, playing melody with the right hand and chords (which, in popular styles, obey the beat in a more obvious way). On Chamkra, there is a stringed instrument which also has a button that's clicked for rhythm.
How do the gods themselves speak the language?
Well, they have the benefit of being able to bend the air all around them to 'sing' with them, plus they're actually fluent and have the correct accent and hence don't miss out on the nuances that come with being EXACT with the deviation of just a couple cents on some pitches or a couple microseconds with some rhythms.
Also helps that the instruments are built right into their bodies (and not just their voice!).
About their homes & bodies: these gods live on overhanging geographical structures in the sky — remains of a dead god[2] who was even larger, to the point of now being a part of the geography — and these music-speaking gods were once human, but their bodies have fused with the dead god's body.
The part where their old body and the dead god's body fused, it forms into a musical instrument, used just as you'd use an arm or a leg or your throat. In some cases, many original body parts get destroyed, including the vocal cords, so in many cases having musical instruments as part of the body is necessary.
Fluency over the Chamkra gods' requires the gods' magic. But perhaps it can be the other way round too, fluency over the gods' language allowing one to get the gods' magic, the gods' power…
Firstly: Stay tuned for the illustrations I plan to make for this.
And also, hi, I forgot I have a general taglist for a while! Ask to be added or removed: @i-love-books-and-so-do-you @thatprolificauthor @author-a-holmes @myst3rious-figur3 @saltwaterbells @shankhachil