Comments on: Why music sounds right – the hidden tones in our own speech

By: Joseph Shore

Joseph Shore — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 18:25:51 +0000

Song came first in evolution. Speech came very late. The mechanism which was designed for singing and making jungle imitative sounds was later utilized for speech. It is not odd therefore for the formants of the vocal tract to show a musical scale within them. Mario Vaneechoutte and John R. Skoyles have an analysis on the net: “Song (musicality, singing capacity), we argue, underlies both the evolutionary origin of human language and its development during early childhood. Specifically, we propose that language acquisition depends upon a Music Acquiring Device (MAD) which has been doubled into a Language Acquiring Device (LAD) through memetic evolution. Thus, in opposition to the currently most prominent language origin hypotheses (Pinker, S. 1994. The Language Instinct, W. Morrow, N.Y.; Deacon, T.W. 1997. The Symbolic Species, W.W. Norton, N.Y.), we contend that language itself was not the underlying selective force which lead to better speaking individuals through natural selection. Instead we suggest that language emerged from the combination of (i) natural selection for increasingly better mental representation abilities during animal evolution (thinking, mental syntax) and (ii) natural selection during recent human evolution for the human ability to sing, and finally (iii) memetic selection that only recently (within the last 100,000 years) reused these priorly evolved abilities to create language. Thus, speech – the use of symbolic sounds linked grammatically – is suggested to be largely a cultural phenomenon, linked to the Upper Palaeolithic revolution. The ability to sing provided the physical apparatus and neural respirational control that is now used by speech. The ability to acquire song became the means by which children are able to link animal mental syntax with syntax of spoken language. Several studies strongly indicate that this is achieved by children through a melody-based recognition of intonation, pitch, and melody sequencing and phrasing. Language, we thus conjecture, owes its existence not to innate language learning competencies, but to innate music-associated ones, which – unlike the competencies hypothesized for language – can be straightforwardly explained to have evolved by natural selection.
“The question on the origin of language then becomes the question on the origin of song in modern humans or early Homo sapiens. At present our ability to sing is unexplained. We hypothesize that song capacity evolved as a means to establish and maintain pair- and group-bonding. Indeed, several convergent examples exist (tropical song birds, whales and porpoises, wolves, gibbons) where song was naturally selected with regard to its capacities for reinforcing social bonds. Anthropologists find song has this function also amongst all human societies.
“In conclusion, the ability to sing not only may explain how we came to speak, but may also be a partial answer to some of the very specific sexual and social characteristics so typical for our species and so essential in understanding our recent evolution.”

By: Teresita

Teresita — Fri, 22 May 2009 21:48:23 +0000

My cousin and I talked about this. He says that he notices how the shouts of a driver is usually higher pitched and it gets higher as the driver gets more upset. I notice how in most languages, your voice would go up when asking a question. Some universal thing I guess. But riddle me this: why does the Indians' scale cover more than 12 semi-tones?

By: Phil Goetz

Phil Goetz — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 17:13:39 +0000

The reason we have 12 tones in the scale has been well-known for about 2500 years. It’s by construction. You construct the scale by adding notes such that the ratio of their frequencies to previous frequencies can be expressed using small integers. And it isn’t exactly 12 tones; it’s different depending on which note you start with. We get our 12 tones by dividing an octave up into “equal” components that are good approximations of the correct tones for each of the 12 notes.
“culturally I don’t know of any that do but many composers such as Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, John Cage and Anton Webern composed 12 tone music.”
IMHO, Berg, Cage, and Webern composed 12-tone noise, not music.

By: Rich

Rich — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 13:09:03 +0000

While it’s true that a vibrating tube can hardly avoid containing harmonics, maybe the research shows why we *prefer* such harmonics in our music. After all, there are few limits to the noises we can make (small children are especially good at this. Just give them a saucepan and a spoon) but we prefer simple harmonics.
(If the lower frequencies are vital for understanding how come we can understand a whisper, a high-frequency hiss?)

By: Mario Vaneechoutte

Mario Vaneechoutte — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 11:46:21 +0000

Maybe this fits to some extent with some of our earlier thoughts on the relation between human musicality and language: we can speak because we could sing. http://users.ugent.be/~mvaneech/ORILA.FIN.html Regards. Mario

By: justone

justone — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 02:38:31 +0000

+1 for don’s comment.
I’d be interested in more information on this research re just intonation vs equal temperament.
and I immediately thought of the inter-tonal subtleties of some african music.
I’m sure there’s something in it,
but while I note the researcher mentions mandarin,
really this whole thinking seems euro-centric.

By: JanetK

JanetK — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 10:22:04 +0000

Give me a break. Can someone explain how things can be otherwise? Is there a way for a tube or a string, or a throat for that matter, to resonate and produce harmonics that are not harmonic? This is physics not linguistics or musicology. Of course the harmonics of any vibrating system will have resemblances to intervals like thirds and fifths etc.

By: Jonathan Stray

Jonathan Stray — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 03:01:29 +0000

This article seems to make the claim that “musical scales are based on human voice frequencies.” However, I am skeptical: all of the natural or “perfect” harmonies are actually derived from the overtone series [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmonic_series_(music) ] which is just the set of natural resonant pitches of a plucked string or blown tube.
In fact, pretty much any long and thin vibrating object will produce a standard series of evenly spaced harmonics. From wind in the reeds to our own vocal cords, the harmonic series is just the sound of nature.
So are musical scales similar to the human voice because it these are the notes that sounded right to us, or are they similar because they both come from the basic physics of sound production?

By: Neuroskeptic

Neuroskeptic — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 10:13:51 +0000

I’ve always thought, without ever having studied the issue (a recipie for disaster), that the reason that music has an emotional aspect (minor sad, major happy, etc.) must be somehow related to the sound of people’s voices when they are expressing those emotions. Somehow, a minor key taps into the same frequency patterns that characterise sad speech, or crying, or something.
Does anyone know of any research on that question?

By: P.W. Fenton

P.W. Fenton — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 21:28:54 +0000

For this idea to be valid, you’d have to study the speech patterns of people who have never heard music. Only then would the idea that the nature of speech predicts the music be valid. It could be just as valid the other way around… that our speech is influenced by the music we hear from birth.