Download The Genesis of Music and Language Author(s): Bryan G. Levman

The Genesis of Music and Language
Author(s): Bryan G. Levman
Source: Ethnomusicology, Vol. 36, No. 2, (Spring - Summer, 1992), pp. 147-170
Published by: University of Illinois Press on behalf of Society for Ethnomusicology
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VOL.36, No. 2
SPRING/SUMMER1992
ETHNOMUSICOLOGY
The Genesis of Music and Language
BRYANG. 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
primarilymusical in nature.1Because 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 majorityof investigators do
not even consider the possible role of music in language development.
Instead they see language as (1) primarilygestural 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 intermarryinggroups and the discovery of tool-making technologies (Livingstone 1983); (4) fundamentally mimetic, in that primitivehumans
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
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 laterrepudiated 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
literaturein 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 firstpromulgated
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,maintainingthe 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 "surplusvigour"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). ErnstNewman 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
The Genesis of Music and Language
149
that music developed out of concerted rhythmicallabour and CarlStumpfs
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 carriedover into artisticexpression. Music is therefore
primarilya 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 ritualisticsongs in tribalcultures (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 primarilyrhythmic,
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 articulatorymedia 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 primarilymusical 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). Primitivelanguage was
sung, not spoken, its accents (pitch), quantity, and rhythm articulatingthe
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: "Language 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 "articulatedtone," and "tone"is understood as
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Ethnomusicology, Spring/Summer 1992
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 "humanlyorganized 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 "patterningof 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 directlyakin to music. Blacking'sdefinition 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
The Genesis of Music and Language
151
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, proficiency 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
strikingthan 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 elementeuphonious, 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 carriesmeaning 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, "butare at the very best, oratorical shades" (1965:35), and Nadel
regards the indeterminate fluctuation of speech as naturalbut not meaningful, and the fixation of pitch in music as "unnatural"but meaningful
(1930:532). George Listhas 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 sprechstimmewhere 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, Listalso
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 latterwill reinforce or mitigate the
former depending upon the dynamics of combination (1956:53). In Chinese,
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Ethnomusicology, Spring/Summer 1992
expressive intonation remains relatively independent of the tones and even
the dialects. There are furthersimilaritiesbetween 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 articulatorynature, 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 firsthuman language was primarilypitch 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 latertermed
"articulatoryiconicity," 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 primordialhuman language was carried by
the consonantal sounds which, in a "visualspatio-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 protrudinglips 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 "magicalpresuppositions":
(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;
The Genesis of Music and Language
153
(d) the verbal product can be equated with any object, inanimate or
animate; thus, tearing the sentence into pieces by means of violent an
irregularstresses 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 articulationwhich
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 particlesphonemes-which have no intrinsic meaning in themselves but can be
combined into new units of meaning known as morphemes.5 The development of double articulationmarks 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
aftertheir separation, music and speech continue to be intimatelyconnected
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 timbralquality
and vocal information (formants) in its spectro-temporal harmonic patterns.
In a recent article ErnstTerhardtshows that it is primarilyauditory 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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Ethnomusicology, Spring/Summer 1992
Philip Liebermanhas 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 partiallycontradicts 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 caseotherwise 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 variationwas
capable of delineating only a limited number of thoughts/feelings. As
humans developed their abilityto manipulate the vocal tract,they found they
could create distinctive "timbralunits"(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 "TheSearch
for a SurvivalValue 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
The Genesis of Music and Language
155
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 identitywhich has survivalvalue 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 characteristicwhine of zebras,
the purringof 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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Ethnomusicology, Spring/Summer 1992
frequency band glissando pitches with minimal noise content, are (to my
musician's ears) melodic sounding and seem to reflect sometimes contentment, 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 precursorto 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 territorialproclamation 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 Pleistocene hominids developed an open repertoire of territorialsongs 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 (1965:56465). 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 attractfemales first (Bright 1984:85). This is
thought to be due to the fact that males with larger vocal repertoires have
The Genesis of Music and Language
157
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,
territorialdominance, and the promotion of family security (Bright 1984:21218). The degree of synchrony of the duet indicates how well established a
pair is in their territoryand 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-survivaland often results in the death or injuryof 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
difficultto locate, a selection pressure which has led to convergent evolution
in several species (Halliday 1983:70). Whether the calling animal is motivated by altruism for family or species, or a deliberate attempt to create a
noisy melee duringwhich it can escape, is not known. Clearlya 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 particularlyelaborate 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 lattercase,
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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Ethnomusicology, Spring/Summer 1992
Intraspecies communication for purposes of social cohesion is another
important function of animal vocalization. Marlerhas 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 patternof delivery and dynamic content. As an example
he cites the grunts that gorillas, chimpanzees, baboons, and langurs utter,
"apparentlyas 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 activitylike 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 thatthey have a form
of language, most ethologists would agree that they have a form of song,
or music. They are particularlywell 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.
Fromthe 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;widespectrum 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'swork
with chaffinches and white-crowned sparrows (Bright 1984:88-89),
work by Kuhl withJapanese macaques (ibid.:224), and work by Cheney
and Seyfarthwith 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 primitivehumans 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 imitatingit for one's own or one's family'sadvantage is not a very large
The Genesis of Music and Language
159
one, especially considering that parental imitation is an important part
of primate ontogeny.
There
is no evidence that animal communication is symbolic. On the
(3)
contrary, it appears to be isomorphic with sound signal structure
carryingthe message in a direct, iconic fashion. Marlerhas noted several
interspecies similaritiesincluding 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 structureddistance signal which is metricallybased 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'sgrowth 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 structuralplans 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 familiarwith 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 mirroredin the failure of deaf
children to acquire a normal phonological system, a failure which Fry
attributesspecifically 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
160
Ethnomusicology, Spring/Summer 1992
"cooing" (Lenneberg 1966), "fullyresonant 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, involuntaryvocalizations
and identifies five stages: the phonation stage (0-1 month), where quasiresonant 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. Starksuggests that the infant has two separate sound-making
systems: "one associated with expression of distress in which vocalic
elements predominate and which has rhythmicand stress variationand 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 Gardnersuggests 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 revelatoryof the language acquisition
The Genesis of Music and Language
161
process. RuthWeir 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 mirrorsphylogeny:
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-Englerposits 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).
Furtherevidence 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 infantto produce than the farmore 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 characteristicof 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).
162
Ethnomusicology, Spring/Summer 1992
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 Africandrumlanguages where all semantic meaning
is transmittedby 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 structureof 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 bipartite structureof 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 interactaccording to their
own specialty. John Sloboda, citing Gates and other more recent studies,
suggests that there is a partialbut incomplete overlap between the areas of
the brain responsible for music and those responsible for language, but that
ultimately music employed "adistinctive 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
The Genesis of Music and Language
163
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 traditionof antiquitycited by Herder, the firstlanguage of the human
race was song ([1722]1966:136), a view also held by the Havasupai of the
GrandCanyon who believed that the spiritspreceding humans on earth sang
ratherthan 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., Harrison1977, 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 Australianaborigines 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 CanadianInuit, music is used to ensure successful
hunting (Smith 1985, Binnington and Ming-Yueh 1985); among the Seminole, 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 virtuallyevery tribal
164
Ethnomusicology, Spring/Summer 1992
culture this author has reviewed (see also Wallaschek 1893:170) offers
substantial support for this assertion: from the Sioux Grass Dance Song
(McAllester1984) 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 marriedto 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 certaincircumstances 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 periodically 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
importantsurvival aid to assist the organism in its intra-and interspecies and
environmental navigations. The function of the musical faculty, as we have
seen, is primarilycommunicative, operating in various social situations to
enhance survival. The musical faculty is by its nature primarilyinstinctive,
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
The Genesis of Music and Language
165
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 primarilyin 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 "primalpassions"
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 structuraland
semantic role in language than is generally assumed. It is only relatively
recently (Crystal1969) that an attempthas 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. Clearlyother forms of communication like manual signing also
employ language, but since this paper is concerned with the relationship of music to language,
it is primarilyconcerned with language and its superset of speech. Language is not used in its
most general meaning of "anysystem of communication," as in that case music itself is certainly
also a language. I use "music"in its normal sense of "organizedtones." 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 traditionaltheory, 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).
166
Ethnomusicology, Spring/Summer 1992
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 traditionallyviewed 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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