author(s): bryan g. levman source: ethnomusicology, vol ...148 ethnomusicology, spring/summer 1992...

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The Genesis of Music and LanguageAuthor(s): Bryan G. LevmanSource: Ethnomusicology, Vol. 36, No. 2, (Spring - Summer, 1992), pp. 147-170Published by: University of Illinois Press on behalf of Society for EthnomusicologyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/851912Accessed: 15/07/2008 17:11

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SPRING/SUMMER 1992

The Genesis of Music and Language

BRYAN G. LEVMAN TORONTO, ONTARIO

his article proposes to evince evidence in support of the hypothesis that language and music evolved out of a common "proto-faculty" which was

primarily musical in nature.1 Because the subject of musical genesis and the relationship of music and language are topics which have been very controversial, it may well help to start by orienting the reader with a brief survey of the literature in the field.

Authors have adopted three primary positions: (1) that language and music developed along separate paths and are in effect two completely different faculties, (2) that music developed out of language, or at least was chronologically later than language, and (3) that language developed out of music, or both developed from a common "proto-faculty."

Implicit in the work of most glosso-geneticists2 is position one. This may be because these scholars-usually linguists, anthropologists, psychologists, philosophers-know little about music, for though they often make the point that language can carry semantic meaning in intonation, most do not posit an evolutionary connection. In fact the vast majority of investigators do not even consider the possible role of music in language development. Instead they see language as (1) primarily gestural in origin, either through bodily movements (Hewes 1983) or through the manipulation of the mouth and vocal tract as the gestural instrument (Foster 1983; Pulleyblank 1983); (2) the result of a primitive representational system which primeval humans developed to help navigate the environment (Bickerton 1990); (3) generated by forces for social cohesion and development like the need to communicate between intermarrying groups and the discovery of tool-making technolo- gies (Livingstone 1983); (4) fundamentally mimetic, in that primitive humans imitated sounds in their environment (Plato 1937), perhaps to assure greater success in hunting (Fischer 1983); (5) fundamentally emotive and affective, with the first word-sounds originating in instinctive expressive declarations of species identification, warning calls, cries for help, and so forth (Von Raffler-Engel 1983). As will be demonstrated below, some of these views

? 1992 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

VOL. 36, No. 2 ETHNOMUSICOLOGY

148 Ethnomusicology, Spring/Summer 1992

have important implications for the relationship of language and music; however, few scholars make an explicit connection between the two. One anthropologist (Livingstone 1973:25) has suggested that humans "could sing long before they could talk and that singing was in fact a prerequisite to speech and hence language," but he later repudiated this position (1983:180); and two linguists, after detailed comparisons of the emotional patterns in speech intonation and music, have postulated a common origin for both faculties (Fonagy and Magdics 1963). There is also a significant body of literature in the fields of ethology and child psychology which demonstrates the importance of articulated tone in communication and language acquisition which this paper will examine in support of its thesis.

Position two, that music evolved out of language, was first promulgated by the sociologist Herbert Spencer (1857). His view was that the distinctive traits of song were simply the traits of emotional speech intensified and

systematized. Thus the pitch, intervals, loudness, timbre, and rate of variation of the voice-all the modulating factors of the emotions-become exaggerated and transformed by the force of great emotion into song. Presumably, Spencer's position was influenced by Darwin's view that music originated from the love calls of primates during courtship; Darwin himself disagreed with Spencer's interpretations, maintaining the more narrow view that "musical notes and rhythm were first acquired by the male or female progenitors of mankind for the sake of charming the opposite sex" ([1871]1981 vol. 2:336), and that music then became firmly associated with the passions. Darwin thought that music probably came before language (ibid.:337), although he did not draw an explicit evolutionary link between the two faculties.

Musicologists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries adopt a variety of different views, though most seem to subscribe to position one or two: that music and language were separate faculties or that music developed out of language. Richard Wallaschek, for example, believes that music arose from a primary rhythmic impulse in humans which was first manifested in dance-play, the result of a "surplus vigour" exceeding the energies required or immediate needs (1891:375-76). In his view neither speech nor music originated one from the other, but both arose from an identical primitive stage (ibid.:383). Ernst Newman also asserts that music was independent of speech in origin, and maintains that humans possess a musical faculty that must have existed much earlier than speech in the order of time: "man certainly expressed his feelings in pure indefinite sound long before he had learned to agree with his fellows to attach certain meanings to certain stereotyped sounds" ([1905]1969:210-11). In examining the various theories of music origin up to 1930, musicologist Siegfried Nadel also rejects the Darwinian and Spencerian positions out of hand. Both Karl Bucher's view


that music developed out of concerted rhythmical labour and Carl Stumpfs position that music originated as a more efficient "acoustic sign language" for long distance communication are discussed and dismissed. Nadel's view is that music is an out-of-the-ordinary, supernatural language which has been superadded to speech by a process of what he calls "transference"- emotional experience carried over into artistic expression. Music is therefore primarily a language of the gods and the demons, a language of invocation and exorcism, and Nadel makes the important point of the ubiquity of religious and ritualistic songs in tribal cultures (1930). Among contemporary scholars, C. M. Bowra, echoing Wallaschek, believes that music was first manifested in the dance and that song developed by fitting standardized, formulaic sequences of (speech) sounds to pre-existing melodies (1962). Although music was post-linguistic, its motivation was primarily rhythmic, and only secondarily vocal (Wallaschek 1891, 1893). Curt Sachs originally suggested that music may have originated from speech or from emotion, calling the resulting styles logogenic and pathogenic (1943:41), but he later seems to change these views (1965:38). His dominant attitude is ironic detachment, rejecting all theories of musical origin as wrong or unprovable, and preferring to concentrate on primitive musics which are accessible for study (1948:1-2). This view is also shared byJohn Blacking who believes that music is a species-specific biological human impulse, separate from language, which is inseparable from the social context in which it develops (1973:55). Bruno Nettl hypothesizes that at one time humans had a kind of communication that shared elements of both language and music, and that the two articulatory media of contrastive vowels and pitches eventually took divergent evolutionary paths (1956:136-37, 1983:166).

The evolution of music from speech is a position that is also attributed to Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Sachs 1943:19; Nadel 1930:535); however his view is closer to Nettl's, that music and speech have a common origin, a faculty which he believed to be primarily musical in nature. For Rousseau, the first words expressed the feelings of love, hate, pity, and anger, so that language was originally vital, singable, and passionate before it became simple and methodical ([1761]1966:12, chapter two). Primitive language was sung, not spoken, its accents (pitch), quantity, and rhythm articulating the passions in an imitative, iconic fashion (ibid.:15, chapter four). Eventually language becomes more regular and less passionate, substituting ideas for feelings. Accent diminishes and consonantal articulation increases: "Lan- guage becomes more exact and clearer, but more prolix, duller and colder" (ibid.:16, chapter five).

Much of the question of whether music or speech came first revolves around the definition of the word "music." If one defines music, as Rousseau and others appear to do, as "articulated tone," and "tone" is understood as

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definite, sustained pitch, then clearly animals have music, and the impulsive emotional outbursts of both humans and animals are musical. If music is defined as "humanly organized sound" (Blacking 1973:26), then by definition neither animal sounds nor the spontaneous sounds of human passions are musical. The issue of what constitutes an adequate definition of music is highly contentious, and many would dispute any proposal as too limiting. Jean-Jacques Nattiez, for example, claims that "what is musical in reality, is every phenomenon which a cultural group agrees to regard as such" (1971:97), and certainly the history of music in the twentieth century, where random noise, environmental cacophony, and the sounds of nature have entered the musical repertoire, bears this position out. Ethologists would argue that the "songs" of the humpback whales are just as much music as the "songs" of humans and some ethnomusicologists might agree. Certainly with the changing attitudes of the late twentieth century, a work like African Song Cycle, which records the sounds of nature and animals over a 24 hour period at a Kenyan water hole (Krause 1989), would be considered "musical" by many members of the music listening public at large. As early as 1941 George Herzog proposed "patterning of sound" for an (unsatisfactory, in his view) definition of music, and pointed out that "there seems to be no criterion for any theoretical separation of the vocal expression of animals from human music" (1941:4).

The problem of course is that if one accepts any pitched, sustained sonic vocalization as music, the definition can become too general to have any value, and the hypothesis that speech evolved out of music is close to being circular: speech, it can be argued, is a form of pitched sonic vocalization, and is therefore directly akin to music. Blacking's definition of music as "humanly organized sound" is clearly also inadequate, as it would automatically include everyday speech, which most would not consider musical. On the other hand a definition of music in terms of the popularly held Western European view of its aesthetic function would deny the social and communication functions which it shares with speech. These mutually contradictory positions are not immediately resolvable.

I shall try to steer clear of these definitional pitfalls and concentrate on the notion that music and speech are essentially similar in nature and function. My hypothesis is that in the distant evolutionary past both arose out of the fundamental impulse of the organism to survive, an impulse for which hearing and vocalization were indispensable aids. The first language of humans was therefore a form of music/speech which they developed to help navigate in the environment and increase chances of survival. This primal language was much more akin to what we understand as music than it was to speech, but with the discovery of double articulation-a linguistic concept which will be discussed below-it bifurcated into the separate evolutionary


paths which, though related, have remained distinct to this day. I shall adduce evidence of music/speech similarity and relatedness from several different disciplines in an attempt to demonstrate the common origin of both faculties, and elucidate something of their common nature. Ideally, profi- ciency in a wide variety of fields would be required to do this subject justice. Biology, ethology, physical and social anthropology, ethnomusicology, child and cognitive psychology, neurology, linguistics, acoustics, and of course music are some of the areas to be investigated. Since my only formal training is in the field of music, I must request the reader's indulgence.

On the surface, the similarities between speech and music are more striking than the differences. Both create and manipulate sound with respect to its (1) pitch, or highness and lowness; (2) duration of individual sounds and speed of overall vocalization; (3) dynamics, including softness, loudness, and accent; (4) timbre or distinctive vocal quality; and (5) articulation. The qualitative difference that many Westerners see between music and speech has largely to do with how each utilizes the pitch element- euphonious, sustained pitch being viewed as the distinguishing mark of music, and "random" consonantal/vowel sounds the hallmark of speech. This view has led to a misconception that only music carries meaning in pitch inflection, while the meaning of speech is fixed only in its phonemes and morphemes; and this has resulted in an artificial separation of the two faculties. Sachs says that pitch fluctuations in language do not change meaning, "but are at the very best, oratorical shades" (1965:35), and Nadel regards the indeterminate fluctuation of speech as natural but not meaningful, and the fixation of pitch in music as "unnatural" but meaningful (1930:532). George List has shown that a more accurate method of viewing the relationship of speech and music is obtained by placing them together on an infinitely variable pitch continuum: in some forms of speech (intonational chant, sprechstimme), intonation3 or melodic patterning has much more importance than in others (recitation, monotonic chant) where intonation is actually negated (1963). So the Nyangumata of Western Australia use sustained pitch as a superlative suffix; the Maori of New Zealand sing a celebratory haka akin to sprechstimme where pitch fluctuations have formal and semantic properties; while the Hopi of Arizona have a type of didactic monotonic chant where pitch is secondary to the message, and auxiliary tones are primarily punctuation devices. In order to include tone languages like Chinese, where pitch has direct lexical import, List also posits a hypothetical third dimension to his pitch chart. Yuen Ren Chao has shown that while the actual pitch movement of Chinese speech is "the algebraic sum of tone and intonation," the latter will reinforce or mitigate the former depending upon the dynamics of combination (1956:53). In Chinese,

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expressive intonation remains relatively independent of the tones and even the dialects. There are further similarities between music and speech in terms of their harmonic spectra which will be discussed below.

The issue of pitch is fundamental to the question of the relatedness of music and speech. If my hypothesis is correct, then pitch at one time must have played as important a role in humankind's proto-language as it does today in music. Clearly there are other differences between music and speech of a rhythmic, dynamic, or articulatory nature, but most would view these as differences of degree rather than kind, and they will not be dealt with here in a systematic fashion.

The theory that the first human language was primarily pitch based was first posited by Rousseau ([1761]1966:14-16, chapter four). This language was sung, not spoken; and it was iconic, that is, it imitated in its pitch accents the objects or feelings that it sought to communicate. At this point in human pre-history, communication was not symbolic but spontaneous, and the medium was directly expressive of the message. This view, which every parent responding to a child's cry instinctively understands, was later termed "articulatory iconicity," or "sound-meaning isomorphism" by glosso-geneticists, and today has an important place in language origin theory. Mary L. Foster's view is that meaning in primordial human language was carried by the consonantal sounds which, in a "visual spatio-relational sense," imitated the objects to which they referred (1983). So the "p" consonant, for example, which Foster labels "protrusive" means "pill" or "globule" in Egyptian ("py-t"), or "to be fat, puffed up" in Proto-Indo-European ("pey"). E. G. Pulleyblank has a similar theory, and gives examples of the velar stop "k" representing sharpness, and the labial-velar approximant "w" which involves roundness of the protruding lips and therefore symbolizes roundness and the associated ideas of turning (1983). The weakness in these theories is that they do not directly deal with the musical or sonic element of language. Using laryngeal tomography and spectography, Ivan Fonagy postulates a unified theory of psychic, phonetic, and physical isomorphism which represents a pre-conceptual, pre-rational type of mental processing (1981:61, 1983). So, for example, the state of the larynx (relaxed or contracted), the intonation, tempo, and loudness of the sound are direct expressions of mental states and rely on certain "magical presuppositions":

(a) the behavior of the part may be used to represent the behavior of the whole; the posture and the movement of the body may be projected on the larynx;

(b) the apparent movements of the pitch in the acoustic domain are representing the movements of the body;

(c) the speaker may identify with the listener; thus, the "strangled" voice may be equivalent with the throttling of a present or absent adversary;


(d) the verbal product can be equated with any object, inanimate or animate; thus, tearing the sentence into pieces by means of violent an irregular stresses may be a substitute of an action of violence directed against the listener or against a third person (ibid.:61).

Fonagy goes on to prove that certain emotions have distinct pitch and amplitude patterns which can be identified, even when using "nonsense" sentences.

Fonagy's convincing argument that human proto-language was iconic, that is, that the prosodic4 and physical components were directly expressive of inner mental states, accounts for the popularity of the view that music primarily expresses emotion, while speech expresses rational thought. In Fonagy's view, humankind's first language-the common source out of which music and speech were later to develop-was clearly "musical" and the musical or prosodic elements carried the meaning directly. What we understand as speech was a later development of double articulation which evolved to express more complicated concepts which pitch variation alone was incapable of expressing. Double articulation, or duality of patterning, refers to the sonic division of a language into individual sound particles- phonemes-which have no intrinsic meaning in themselves but can be combined into new units of meaning known as morphemes.5 The development of double articulation marks the exact point where language ceases to be isomorphic and becomes symbolic. It is also of course the point where music and speech begin to separate and go their different ways. Yet even after their separation, music and speech continue to be intimately connected through their common frequency component.

In sound perception, the frequency component is the most important element. Frequency carries not only the highness and lowness information about the sound (pitch), but also simultaneously encodes the timbral quality and vocal information (formants) in its spectro-temporal harmonic patterns. In a recent article Ernst Terhardt shows that it is primarily auditory spectral pitch (the amplitudes, phases, and frequencies of part tones) which carries both musical and textual sonic information (1991:222), and that the human ear is an efficient Fourier spectrum analyzer which extracts information by "contourizing" the sound in the same way that the eye perceives the overall visual contours of an object. This accounts for the durability of short term memory for pitch which is needed to acquire information from acoustic signals whose parameters are time variant, that is speech, and music (ibid.:225). Terhardt points out that the spectral pitch time pattern of an audio signal includes all aurally relevant information, and from the data extracted a new signal can be synthesized that is almost indistinguishable from the original.

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Philip Lieberman has also demonstrated the importance of rapid spectral pitch tracking for language comprehension (1983). He has shown how the ear is capable of decoding phonemes at the rate of 15-20 units per second, which it does by tracking formant frequency patterns. A formant is a combination of various part tones in dominant frequency bands which are decoded by the ear as the distinctive vowels sound. Formant frequency normalization is also used to identify the intended phonemic class of consonants: for example, "b" and "p" are distinguished only by the difference in phonation onset time (1975:52-53).

That so much information is contained in the spectral frequency component of speech at least partially contradicts the popular view that the semantic content of speech is not pitch dependent. The ability to hear a vowel or consonant through spectrum analyzing'does not of course indicate that the pitch-encoded sound carries meaning related to its pitch; however, it does point to a time in human evolution when this was probably the case- otherwise why would the organism have developed such an efficient encoding/decoding system? It is in fact no accident that pitch, which as melody in time represents the level of greatest differentiation in music (Sloboda 1985:32), is also, as spectral frequency in space, the essence of the phoneme, the contrastive segmental unit of speech. Somewhere along the evolutionary track, as humankind's ancestors continued to evolve, sustained pitch alone ceased to be a sufficient vehicle for communication. For one thing, it was too slow, and secondly too inefficient, as melodic variation was capable of delineating only a limited number of thoughts/feelings. As humans developed their ability to manipulate the vocal tract, they found they could create distinctive "timbral units" (formants) which stood by themselves as independent sonic segments. Eventually, a further discovery was made. By using these sounds symbolically, an unlimited variety of meaning could be created. Yet though speech now began to diverge sharply from music, both still shared the same raw material: wide pitch bands combined in spectral space (timbre or phonemes) and "pure" pitch tones moving in time (tone or melody);6 and the former, with its physiological difficulty of production and spectral sophistication, suggests an evolutionary development of the latter.

That the organism's hearing/vocalization abilities would never have developed at all had they no survival value is self-evident; however, their evolutionary functions are not immediately clear. In his article "The Search for a Survival Value of Music," Juan Roederer suggests that music evolved as a device "to train the acoustic sense in sophisticated sound pattern recognition as part of the inborn human instinct to acquire language from the moment of birth," or as a faculty for processing the musical components of speech (1984:352, 354-55); however, this position is evolutionarily


backward as it assumes that music developed after speech, and is ancillary to it. What Roederer terms "the musical contents of speech ... the vowels, tone of voice, inflections, voice recognitions, the time sequencing cues of many of the oriental languages, and the rise and fall of speech tone in African languages" (ibid.:354) are, in fact, the essence of human's first communication efforts, not a later superaddition to speech. Roederer's third suggestion that music was selected for its value in creating coherence within social groups has validity and is similar to John Blacking's views (1977) and to Frank Livingstone's position (1983) with respect to speech.

A study of animal communication should shed some additional light on the ubiquity of the hearing/vocalization "proto-faculty" in human ancestors, and its evolutionary survival value. Among the various forms of communication available to animals (tactile, olfactory, visual, and auditory), sound was selected by evolution for its ability to catch attention, to transmit information efficiently in a relatively short time, and to species-identify and locate when visual contact was not possible. Sound was also an important stimulus for mating and procreation, social interaction and assistance, and predator avoidance. Most animals have developed some form of call which fulfills one or more of these functions. To Western ears the call is either musical or cacophonic or somewhere in between. Thus, for example, the intoned "speech" of a zebra sounds very much like a human talking without words, the "song" of a humpback whale is extremely melodic, and the scream of a vervet monkey piercing and discordant. One element all animal vocalization has in common, however, is that the message is carried in the modulation of the pitch, and animals' auditory systems are even better adapted than humans' to distinguish the finest spectral contiguities in (what are to humans) very similar sounds (Jolly 1985:200, Bright 1984:229).

Ethologists have identified several different forms of animal communication which are common to all species, including humankind's ancestors, the primates. Although in most cases these signals are a combination of auditory, visual, olfactory, and tactile displays, in this article I am primarily concerned with the first. From the evolutionary point of view species identification calls are perhaps the most basic, as failure to recognize and mate with one's own species would be fatal in an animal that only reproduces once (Halliday 1983:48). Many of the unchanging parts of bird song are important for species recognition, while variable elements might indicate a local dialect or individual identity which has survival value in terms of a parent recognizing and caring for its young or the maintenance of a bond between breeding parents (ibid.:50, 54-55). The whistles of dolphins and humpback whales, the mooing of cows, the characteristic whine of zebras, the purring of cats, the honking of the seal, and the infant coo of the Japanese macaques may also be species identification signals. All make use of narrow

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frequency band glissando pitches with minimal noise content, are (to my musician's ears) melodic sounding and seem to reflect sometimes content- ment, sometimes equanimity on the part of the vocalizer, with no sense of excitement or arousal.

Species identification songs, where the animal so to speak "names" itself, and is capable of recognizing its own family from among thousands of other animals, are thought to be a precursor to the development of human language by those who believe that vocalization's first function was the naming of persons and objects (Livingstone 1973:25). Species-specific signals are also closely related to territorial proclamation signals, and these are a widespread phenomenon among most animals, including birds and some primates (the wail of the indri or the trills of the titi and marmoset monkeys, for example). Extensive research with birds has shown that these songs are learned by imitation and "open"-that is, birds are able to recombine the sound patterns to generate new songs (Bright 1984:88-108). The ability to coin new linguistic messages from existing material is called openness, or productivity, and is considered by many a sine qua non of human language. Livingstone has suggested that Lower and Middle Pleisto- cene hominids developed an open repertoire of territorial songs to defend their home range, and this preadapted them to speech and symboling (1973:26). Later he theorized that exogamy and the need for intertroop communication was the reason for symbolic language development (1983). Peter Marler has noted that higher primates-rhesus monkeys, chimpanzees, baboons, and gorillas-produce two completely different kinds of sounds which he relates to inter- and intraspecies communication (1965:564- 65). The purer (narrow frequency bands), higher pitched, more musical sounds serve for communication over distance to maintain group spacing and proclaim species specificity over the ambient noise. The wider spectrum, lower frequency, less structured vocalizations are used when the animals are in visual contact. This sound system is noisier but much more complex with the ability to produce subtle and continuous variation in the sound signals and meanings. The existence of this dual sound system, and most notably the simpler, clearer, musical vocalizations, would seem to provide the basis for intergroup communication which Livingstone is postulating. The wider band sound suggests an evolutionary link to the phoneme.

Another important form of animal communication is the mating song which Darwin viewed as the evolutionary antecedent of human music. Studies have shown that developed vocal ability among birds is an important survival asset when it comes to obtaining a mate: birds with the most complicated, elaborate songs attract females first (Bright 1984:85). This is thought to be due to the fact that males with larger vocal repertoires have


larger and better quality territories (Halliday 1983:68). Among primates the distinctive, highly coordinated duets of indri and gibbon couples serve similar purposes, including the reinforcement of monogamist pair bonds, territorial dominance, and the promotion of family security (Bright 1984:212- 18). The degree of synchrony of the duet indicates how well established a pair is in their territory and therefore discourages displacement attempts.

Aggression signals are also very common between animals, and paradoxically they seem to have been selected for their tendency to reduce aggression and the amount of actual fighting that takes place. Fighting is clearly contra-survival and often results in the death or injury of one or both of the parties involved. Curtailment of aggression is achieved by threat displays-in most cases one of the potential combatants backs down and submits to the other. Thus, for example, the roaring of male red deer stags during the breeding season inhibits aggression, and the use of low pitched toad calls (indicating a larger animal) shortens fights (Halliday 1983:58-59).

Among primates, one of the functions of the loud call of the cotton-top tamarin was to keep two groups apart, thereby avoiding a fight (Bright 1984:222). The roar of the rhesus monkey, the howls of the howler monkey, the grunt of the gorilla, and the bark of the chimpanzee can serve a similar function. Perhaps the most universal of all animal vocalizations, and the one believed to be wholly genetically transmitted, is the predator warning call. These are short duration, high frequency sounds which are extremely difficult to locate, a selection pressure which has led to convergent evolution in several species (Halliday 1983:70). Whether the calling animal is moti- vated by altruism for family or species, or a deliberate attempt to create a noisy melee during which it can escape, is not known. Clearly a safer solution (to a human) would appear to be silence and hiding; although some animals do react in this fashion, the fact that the alarm call is so prevalent indicates that it must be pro-survival on the evolutionary balance. Examples of distinctive warning calls include the bellows of a sifaka troop, the screams of a lemur spotting a hawk, the chirps of the tamarin, and the shrill barks of the gorillas, chimpanzees, baboons, rhesus monkeys, and langurs. The vervet monkeys have developed a particularly elaborate system of warning calls with one for the eagle, one for the leopard, one for the snake, and one for humans in areas of the forest where they are predators. In the latter case, the alarm call is soft and blends with the ambient noise of the environment, making the monkeys extremely difficult to localize (Bright 1984:228). Although the vervet monkey calls seem most similar to human word-like communication, linguists believe the calls are not made up of lexical items, but are holistic utterances communicating whole situations (Bickerton 1990:11).

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Intraspecies communication for purposes of social cohesion is another important function of animal vocalization. Marler has shown that a major portion of the primate vocal repertoire consists of subtly variable signals which change in meaning according to small differences in spectral frequency, temporal pattern of delivery and dynamic content. As an example he cites the grunts that gorillas, chimpanzees, baboons, and langurs utter, "apparently as a means of maintaining contact with each other" (1965:568). Many of these sounds are so closely intergraded that they can not be distinguished by human ears without the aid of a spectograph to show concentrations of part-tone energy (see Bright 1984:229 for a spectograph of vervet grunts). Other examples of socially cohesive communication include the tamarin "loud" call to locate a lost troop member, the click-like sounds and cries of small infants in many species which locate them and arouse care-giving behavior on the part of parents, and vocal sounds which co-ordinate group activity like the geese cries which precede flight departure of the flock.

An examination of animal communication of even this cursory a nature reveals several important factors for the study of music/speech evolution.

(1) Most animals communicate in a musical-that is, sustained pitch variable-mode, and although many might dispute that they have a form of language, most ethologists would agree that they have a form of song, or music. They are particularly well adapted for both the production and reception of this sound, including the discernment of fine spectral differences which we associate with timbral and phoneme detection. From the environmental point of view, tonal (sustained pitch) signals are able to focus energy in a narrow band of frequencies, thus allowing the animal to broadcast with greater power, and extend transmission range (Wiley and Richards 1978:86-87). Tonal signals also permit both frequency and amplitude modulation for encoding information; wide- spectrum signals only permit the latter. Some animal vocalizations, like the "whoop-gobble" of the mangabey, have evolved frequency features that degrade in predictable ways for intergroup spacing purposes (ibid.:91).

(2) Imitation plays an important role in song/call learning. Marler's work with chaffinches and white-crowned sparrows (Bright 1984:88-89), work by Kuhl withJapanese macaques (ibid.:224), and work by Cheney and Seyfarth with vervet monkey children (ibid.:226) show the importance of imitation and learning by parental example. J. L. Fischer has suggested that a powerful impetus for the development of language was the hunting advantage primitive humans would have gained by learning to imitate the food and mating calls of their prey (1983). The step from recognizing a species-specific call (an ability which all primates have) to imitating it for one's own or one's family's advantage is not a very large


one, especially considering that parental imitation is an important part of primate ontogeny.

(3) There is no evidence that animal communication is symbolic. On the contrary, it appears to be isomorphic with sound signal structure carrying the message in a direct, iconic fashion. Marler has noted several interspecies similarities including the use of shrill barks to signal alarms, screeching and screaming sounds as a sign of distress with an "almost universal significance" (1965:568), growling as a form of aggression in antagonistic behavior, and soft grunts used in close contact situations. The excited love songs of birds and primates and the simple, sustained pitch tonalizations associated with species identifications can also be seen as a type of sound-meaning isomorphism, the former an animated expression of the procreation impulse, the latter a spontaneous expression of self.

(4) Although some form of rhythm is implicit in any vocalization, it is worth drawing attention to the chest-beating practice of chimpanzees and gorillas, where their air sacs are inflated and used as a drum. The result is a highly structured distance signal which is metrically based and pitch independent. Also of note is the "grunting" of the baboon in which other animals may join in as choral accompaniment, and which is primarily rhythmic in nature.

Numerous similarities between animal and human ontogeny have led to the hypothesis that an infant's growth in some fashion passes through the development stages of human's evolutionary ancestors. Although this is a controversial issue, it is clear that human ontogenetic development could reveal "some of the earlier structural plans on which evolution built" (Stross 1976:77). If human speech evolved out of an innate biological musical propensity, then this fact should be readily apparent in human infant development, especially in the course of their acquisition of language. For example, Marler has suggested some similarities between the subsong of sparrows, a "series of acoustical transformations appearing in the male sparrow before the development of song" and the babbling stage of infant speech development (1970:672). Both subsong and babbling may represent a learning period where the sparrow and infant become familiar with their vocal equipment through auditory feedback. Deafening the sparrow, or isolating it by removing it from its normal environment results in the development of abnormal song, a fact which is mirrored in the failure of deaf children to acquire a normal phonological system, a failure which Fry attributes specifically to lack of auditory feedback, and capacity for parental imitation (1966).

Although the study of infant language acquisition is an extremely complex field, one fact is clear in almost all the studies: babies "sing" long before they can talk. This singing has been variously characterized as

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"cooing" (Lenneberg 1966), "fully resonant nuclei" (Oller 1980), or vocalic imitation of adult speech (Lieberman 1980). These vocalizations are largely sustained pitch signals of descending contour with a mean frequency of between 313 and 599 Hz (Fox 1990). W. Kessen et al., have demonstrated that babies show a "congenital readiness" to match pitched tones from as young as 18 weeks (1979:98-99).

Psychologists have identified several different stages which an infant passes through in the development of speech production facility. Rachel Stark lists six: reflexive vocalization (0-6 weeks), cooing and laughter (6-16 weeks), vocal play (16-30 weeks), reduplicated babbling (6-10 months), nonreduplicated babbling (10-14 months), and single word production (1980). D. K. Oiler eliminates reflexive, involuntary vocalizations and identifies five stages: the phonation stage (0-1 month), where quasi- resonant nuclei predominate; the GOO stage (2-3 months); the expansion stage (4-6 months), which is characterized by widespread repetitive usage of fully resonant nuclei, squealing and growling; the canonical stage (7-10 months), where babbling starts; and the variegated babbling stage (11-12 months), where the syllabic characteristics of language begin to appear (1980). These stages represent the infant's explorations of its speech production facility,and gradual refinement of capacity along a variety of dimensions. Stark suggests that the infant has two separate sound-making systems: "one associated with expression of distress in which vocalic elements predominate and which has rhythmic and stress variation and pitch contours; the other associated with management of nutrients, in which consonantal elements predominate" (1980:84). Speech develops through the combination and recombination of these two systems as they interact with the infant's increasing articulatory control of the vocal tract. Oiler emphasizes the importance of fully resonant nuclei for development of the capacity to produce vocalic contrasts, squealing and growling for control of pitch, yelling for the control of amplitude, and babbling for the normalization of the opening and closing of the vocal tract so that syllabic timing is "correct."

As well as serving the purpose of phonological experimentation, these early stages in a child's development of language have holistic, melodic, and intonational aspects which are akin to animal communication discussed earlier. Howard Gardner suggests that babbling should not be isolated from musical chanting, and that the two "appear to be indissolubly linked" (1981:74); however, this seems to be an overstatement. Like animal sounds, infant vocalizations are directly expressive of their inner state in a spontaneous, immediate, non-symbolic manner. Studies, therefore, of the actual intonational patterns of infant utterances-as opposed to the learning of the segmental phonemes-might be more revelatory of the language acquisition


process. Ruth Weir believes that a child first "speaks" in sentence-like chunks of pitch or intonation patterns which are learned before and independently of the segmental phonemes (1966:153-57). These are originally expressive or affective patterns and they eventually develop into representational intonations. Stark points out that "the prosodic features of variation in intensity and pitch, rhythmic patterning, and phrasing"-that is, virtually all the elements of music with the exception of timbre-are all contained in a child's first cry (1980:76).

The data lend direct support to the views of some glosso-geneticists outlined above, that human language evolved out of a primordial, holistic, musical-type utterance whose form and meaning were identical (articulatory iconicity). In this view, language ontogeny in the child mirrors phylogeny: that is, the "meaning" of an infant's first vocalizations are directly carried in the intonation patterns-the musical content-of the sound, in the same way that the content of primitive human signals were indissolubly linked with the expressive form which contained them. In a recent study Harold Clumeck lends further support for this position with his observations that in tonal languages like Chinese or Thai correct tonal production is acquired before segmental production, and that the use of pitch in intonational patterns for expressive, affective purposes begins before either tonal or segmental phonological production (1980:259-65). W. Von Raffler-Engler posits that this process actually starts in the womb with the regular cadence of the mother's affective talk to her fetus, and the stroking rhythm of her caress (1983:307).

Further evidence can be adduced in support of the position that narrow band sustained frequency vocalizations have priority over and may in fact be the raw material out of which wide spectrum speech signals eventually develop. Sustained, pitched sounds (fully resonant nuclei or coos), for example, are much easier for an infant to produce than the far more complex, constantly varying syllabic sounds of later speech which presuppose a sophisticated control of the vocal cords and the opening and closing of the vocal tract. Lieberman has demonstrated spectographically that the initial vocalic sounds a child produces at 16 weeks have very little formant differentiation and are closely clustered together; it is not until much later that the vocalic separation characteristic of adult speech begins to emerge (1980). Although with the advent of dual patterning and the referential morpheme these sounds take on a symbolic significance independent of pitch, it is worth recalling that our ability to distinguish their distinctive sounds is entirely dependent on the ear's ability to decode the frequency component of their make-up, that is, the concentration of frequency energies in their three main formants which makes each vowel distinct to our ears (Lieberman 1975).

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One might also like to postulate a musical hegemony by calling in support from the tonal languages like Chinese and Thai, where pitch carries a lexical function, or the African drum languages where all semantic meaning is transmitted by the pitch and rhythm, or the accented language of ancient Greece which had an expressive, rhythmic, and perhaps mnemonic function (Winn 1981:1-14); however there is no linguistic evidence that non-tonal languages are either chronologically later or derivative of tonal ones.

What about the structure of the brain? Does it offer any support for the theory that speech evolved out of a music-type faculty? One might hypothesize that the left side of the brain (the analytic side which controls speech) evolved as a specialized form of the right (the synthetic, holistic side which is dominant for music); however, the data are ambiguous. The bi-

partite structure of the brain itself would appear to be primafacie evidence that both music and speech developed along separate evolutionary paths. Yet neurological studies show that their functions are so closely interrelated that there must have been a closer evolutionary connection. After an extensive survey of the field, Anne Gates andJohn Bradshaw concluded that the rhythmic, time-dependent, sequential aspect of music was processed by the left hemisphere, whereas pitch-based, melodic contourization was

processed by the right side (1977:422-23). In a normal music situation, both sides of the brain are involved in processing, and interact according to their own specialty. John Sloboda, citing Gates and other more recent studies, suggests that there is a partial but incomplete overlap between the areas of the brain responsible for music and those responsible for language, but that ultimately music employed "a distinctive configuration of neural resources" (1985:265). Others have postulated a near complete independence of left and right side functions (Jaynes 1976:364-70), or a much greater role for the right side than was previously suspected in language production, reception, and comprehension (Armstrong and Katz 1983). The latter study suggests that synthetic, holistic languages like Hopi rely more heavily on right hemisphere processes than users of more analytic languages like English, where the world-view is more fragmented. Armstrong and Katz further

suggest that technologically simpler societies may rely more heavily on right hemisphere processes, providing some support for the hypothesis above that the right hemispheric functions-that is, music perception and production-evolved prior to the left.

From the ethnomusicological perspective, one would expect to find support for the musico-glosso-genesis theory in the folk musics of tribal cultures. While the most convincing proof-the discovery of a people who had music, but no speech-is absent, there is nevertheless abundant mythological, sociological, and musical evidence which argues for the hegemony of music. Despite great variation in content, common to most if


not all of human mythology is the theme that music is the language of the

supernatural and a gift from humankind's ancestors, cultural heroes, or the gods, for self and social betterment. In Greek mythology, for example, Amphion built the walls of Thebes by playing on his lyre; he received his powers from his father Zeus, the inventor of music (Nadel 1930:538). In another tradition of antiquity cited by Herder, the first language of the human race was song ([1722]1966:136), a view also held by the Havasupai of the Grand Canyon who believed that the spirits preceding humans on earth sang rather than spoke to each other (Nettl 1986:34). The aborigines of Australia believe that music comes from dreams, visions, totems, or the spirits of the dead (McLean 1986:554, Ellis 1980:727, Moyle 1980:717), a belief shared by the Kaluli of New Guinea who hear the voices of their dead children in the throbbings of their drums (Feld 1983). In Blackfoot mythology music was given to the tribe by the cultural hero to be used as an aid in troubled times, while the Pima of Arizona discovered the unheard music of the cosmos in their dreams (Nettl 1986). To the ancient Egyptians, music was a gift of Thot, the god of wisdom and magic, and to the Indians their ragas, their earliest extant music, were the magical songs sung by their pantheon (Nadel 1930).

Blacking (1973,1977) and others (e.g., Harrison 1977, Lomax 1977) have

repeatedly made the point that music can only be understood when viewed in its social and functional contexts. An examination of these contexts reveals the deeply-held belief that music possesses tremendous power to influence non-musical events (McAllester 1971), a power which extends far beyond the simple manipulation of sound which it shares with speech. So among the Chippewa and Navajo music is used to cure the sick (Haefer 1985; McAllester 1984); among the southern Australian aborigines it is used as a rain charm, for love-magic, to prepare the souls of the dead for future reincarnations, or as a means of social control by publicly chastising wrongdoers (Ellis 1980); among the Wabanaki and Canadian Inuit, music is used to ensure successful hunting (Smith 1985, Binnington and Ming-Yueh 1985); among the Semi- nole, song ensures the success of the corn harvest (Haefer 1985); and in almost every culture music is an essential adjunct to initiation ceremonies and death rites.

Yet the importance of music in these key social situations proves neither the chronological nor the generative priority of music over speech. It only shows societies' deep conviction that music can share and transform experience, invoke and commune with the spirit world, and set this world in its proper order.

The dominance of music over speech is shown not only by music's omnipresence in these ritual situations, but also by the fact that words are of secondary importance in many tribal songs. The universality or near universality of meaningless syllables in the song texts of virtually every tribal

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culture this author has reviewed (see also Wallaschek 1893:170) offers substantial support for this assertion: from the Sioux Grass Dance Song (McAllester 1984) to the peyote music of the Apache (Nettl 1980); from the aboriginal songs of the Wanindilyaugwa on Groote Eylandt in northern Australia (Moyle 1964) to the Vanuatu songs of Melanesia (McLean 1986); from the wordless yodelling of the Pygmies (Cooke 1980) to the songs of the Ojibway midewiwin (Haefer 1985); from the deliberately ambiguous words of southern Australia aborigines' songs (Ellis 1980) to the songs of central Thailand (List 1961), the text is deliberately and systematically subordinated to the musical content of the song. This is not to deny the importance of text which in certain rituals had to be as slavishly followed as the music, but to assert the hegemony in song of the musical component qua music. C. M. Bowra maintains that evolutionarily early songs consisted of meaningless musical sounds accompanying dances-it was not until much later that the meaningful sounds of speech were married to the musical notes (1962). Even in tonal-based languages like Jabo in eastern Liberia, Navajo, Chinese and Thai, where word-pitch has lexical significance, studies have shown that a melodic line evoked by speech melody can under certain circumstances take on a musical life of its own, even when it contradicts the speech-tones (Herzog 1934, List 1961). In the Western song tradition music has periodi- cally dominated and been dominated by the text. James Winn has written an excellent treatise on the subject (1981). Arnold Schoenberg expressed one historical and twentieth-century position when he maintained that he did not trouble himself with grasping the text of a song poem either as a listener or composer-complete understanding came from the music alone (1975:144). In many operatic works, lieder, and even some popular works, this position necessarily follows by default as the music is often melismatic, and the words therefore often indecipherable.

In the above discussion I have tried to adduce evidence which supports the position that a musical-type faculty is innate in humans and their evolutionary ancestors, and that this faculty is the source out of which speech later developed. This musical faculty is a direct development of the organism's sonic perception/production capacities, and was selected by evolution as an important survival aid to assist the organism in its intra- and interspecies and environmental navigations. The function of the musical faculty, as we have seen, is primarily communicative, operating in various social situations to enhance survival. The musical faculty is by its nature primarily instinctive, spontaneous, and non-symbolic, and is therefore capable of only limited semantic range. When the complexity of living required the extension of this range, double articulation developed, which allowed for symboling and what we understand as language. The development of language marked a significant evolutionary crossroads where the music and speech faculties


diverged and developed along separate paths: language in the direction of greater and greater lexical specificity and syntactical sophistication, music concentrating on melodic and rhythmic refinement and combination.

F. E. Sparshott has maintained that any inquiry into the origin of music is really a disguise for a discussion on the true nature of music (1980). This study suggests that music originated as a pre-linguistic, spontaneous form of survival-enhancing communication, and that its meaning was carried on a non-lexical, holistic level primarily in the time-varying pitch and spectral frequency domains. The data also suggest that music as an isomorphic medium is capable of expressing much more than just the "primal passions" Rousseau identified-love, hatred, pity, and anger (1966:12)-and that on the evolutionary timescale music has been used to communicate a wide variety of thoughts, feelings, and responses, including menace and fear, location and identity, possession and ownership, challenge and repulse, need and invocation, loss and mourning, and the state of the social group. For aestheticians, the data point to several new research areas which may help to illuminate the age-old question of "the meaning of music."

While linguists understand the importance of the formant in speech production/perception, the evolutionary significance of pitch and intonation patterns have not been adequately recognized or studied. The data in this study suggest that intonation plays a much more significant structural and semantic role in language than is generally assumed. It is only relatively recently (Crystal 1969) that an attempt has been made to provide a theoretical basis for the study of intonation, and much work still needs to be done.

Notes

1. I use "language" in the abstract sense to mean the biological faculty which enables individuals to learn to use words in meaningful patterns to communicate. Language is a subset of speech which also involves certain other abilities-like control of the vocal cords and sound production, hearing, and so on. Clearly other forms of communication like manual signing also employ language, but since this paper is concerned with the relationship of music to language, it is primarily concerned with language and its superset of speech. Language is not used in its most general meaning of "any system of communication," as in that case music itself is certainly also a language. I use "music" in its normal sense of "organized tones." The issue of exactly how to define the word music is highly contentious and is discussed in greater detail below.

2. Glosso-geneticists are scholars specializing in the field of language origin and evolution. 3. The word "intonation" is ambiguous in English. It means both "the distinctive use of

patterns of pitch or melody" in speech (Crystal 1985:162), and "uttering in a monotone" (American Heritage Dictionary). I am using it in the sense of the first definition.

4. The word "prosody" has a distinctive meaning in the field of linguistics: a term used in suprasegmental phonetics and phonology to refer collectively to variations in pitch, loudness, tempo, and rhythm (Crystal 1985:249). Prosody means the study of music in speech.

5. This is the traditional theory, but Jakobson and Waugh provide a thorough and insightful treatment of the opposing view, that expressive values are inherent in the individual consonantal and vocable sounds of language (1979:177-231).

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6. To speak strictly one should not separate the pitch and timbral components of sound, which are in fact mathematically equivalent: both are represented by the relative amplitude of frequencies. However, musicians have traditionally viewed pitch and timbre as two separate elements, and they can be usefully differentiated both in the psychology of individual perception and in their evolutionary degree of complexity. So, although there is no such thing in nature as a pitch which has no timbre, musicians tend to hear the two as separate (simultaneous) components of a tone, the fundamental frequency being perceived as the melody or tone, and the upper partials as the tone color or timbre.

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Article Contentsp.[147]p.148p.149p.150p.151p.152p.153p.154p.155p.156p.157p.158p.159p.160p.161p.162p.163p.164p.165p.166p.167p.168p.169p.170

Issue Table of ContentsEthnomusicology, Vol. 36, No. 2, Spring - Summer, 1992Front Matter [pp.i-iv]The Genesis of Music and Language [pp.147-170]Modulation in Arab Music: Documenting Oral Concepts, Performance Rules and Strategies [pp.171-195]The Theory and Practice of Thai Musical Notations [pp.197-221]Improvisation as an Acquired, Multilevel Process [pp.223-235]Current Bibliography, Discography, and Filmography [pp.237-253]Book Reviewsuntitled [pp.255-256]untitled [pp.257-259]untitled [pp.260-261]untitled [pp.261-263]untitled [pp.263-266]untitled [pp.266-269]untitled [pp.269-271]Briefly Noted [pp.271-272]

Recording Reviewsuntitled [pp.273-278]untitled [pp.278-283]untitled [pp.283-288]untitled [pp.288-296]untitled [pp.297-299]untitled [pp.299-302]untitled [pp.302-306]

Film Reviewsuntitled [pp.307-311]

Back Matter [pp.313-313]

author(s): bryan g. levman source: ethnomusicology, vol ...148 ethnomusicology, spring/summer 1992...

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