Sep 03 2001

The Rhythm of the Heat

Published by Brian at 10:02 am under linguistics, essay

essay by Brian Charles Clark

Frame drum portrayed in ancient Greek artIn Praise of English author Joseph Shipley writes: “The sing-song notion [of the origins of language] suggests that man’s first speech was song. Looking down a hillside to a lush valley watered by a limpid stream, all graced by the warming sun, man in exuberant spirits burst into exultant or thankful sound. A sort of primitive yodeling soon became a signal to fellow-tribesman or mate on the opposite hill. The Greeks accepted this idea of the origin of speech; it had weight with Darwin, and the astute linguist Jerperson.” [p. 4-5]

I’m not a sing-songer. There’s something fundamentally missing in the idea that song is the origin of language. Melody and harmony, in my experience, are built on the foundation of rhythm. So I’m a big-banger: The origins of language lie in drumming, chanting, and entrainment. Curiously, neither Shipley nor Thomas (Music and the Origins of Language, an examination of 17th-century French theories), lists “rhythm” in the index.

Danesi, in Vico, Metaphor, and the Origin of Language, writes of “Jesperson’s typology” of language-origin theories. “Jesperson’s own theory [was] that language emerged as a consequence of the sounds our human ancestors made in response to love, play, and other socio-affective states. These eventually developed into song and poetic feeling—the protoforms of language.” [“la-la theory,” p. 7] Danesi’s book doesn’t list “rhythm” in the index either. Jesperson’s idea of “socio-affective states” at least seems to strike closer to home than what Shipley calls “sing-song.”

Josephine BakerThe problem, it seems to me, is that sing-song and la-la ignore the bodily basis of rhythm and emotion. The heart beats, sexual desire seems to pulse, the heat on the veldt forms waves in the air, the women cycle with the moon: rhythm, I suggest, is as fundamental a ground of meaning as gravity.

Even Steven Pinker, in How the Mind Works, makes “notes” the primary source of meaning in music. (“The building blocks of a musical idiom are its inventory of notes…” [529].) He does discuss rhythm, though, and provide some interesting insights regarding rhythm’s relationship to consciousness. “Rhythm”, he writes, “is the universal component of music, and in many idioms it is the primary or only component. People dance, nod, shake, swing, stride, clap, and snap to music, and that is a strong hint that music taps into the system of motor control. Repetitive actions like walking, running, chopping, scraping, and digging have an optimal rhythm (usually an optimal pattern of rhythms within rhythms), which is determined by the impedance of the body and of the tools or surface it is working with.” [537-8]

If “music taps into the system of motor control” (which seems obviously true), what does this suggest about rhythm’s relationship to the repetitive patterns employed by the vocal articulators? I suggest that human awareness and use of rhythm and the physiology of human articulation is a case of co-evolution. (One of the main differences, physiologically, between H.s. neanderthalensis and H.s. sapiens is that there was a broadening and flattening of the palette, allowing for a greater range of phonemic articulation.) The use of rhythm might have been a pre-speech source of affective bonding, a bonding essential to human evolution as babies were born more and more neotonously and with longer and longer dependency periods. This idea of co-evolution between the use of rhythm and the physiology of articulators, after the brain expanded in post-australopithicine evolution, would help explain the subsequent migrations out of Africa, and the Homo habilis-period development of a toolkit. Co-evolution would help explain the development, in other words, of human culture. The very things that Pinker finds emblematic of rhythm—“chopping, scraping, and digging”—are exactly those things that might have formed the metaphorical structures of an evolving speech system.

My hunch is that it was indeed affective display, in the form of some rhythmic activity, that led to human proto-speech. We already know that many species of animals use some form of communication to signal other members of their “tribe.” The received wisdom is that these forms of communication are strictly pragmatic–danger! food! sex!–and only, if at all, secondarily affective. But in a book called When Elephants Weep, the authors suggest that emotion in animals is a primary content of communication. As I’ve already suggested (following the lead of, among others, Robert Ornstein in The Evolution of Consciousness), affect likely plays an important role in the evolution of bonding, between parents and offspring certainly, but also among members of a group within an environmental niche. The authors also summarize a heap of observational data that suggests that animals communicate for no reason, other than the joy of doing so.

I think joy–and emotion in general–is greatly underrated in the biological sciences. After ignoring the role of happiness, love, joy, and related affects in healing, medical science has only recently acknowledged the importance of these emotions to well being. Happiness, however, is its own neurochemical reward. The joy of rhythm, in the face of the presence of survival pressures to create closer, more mutual, longer-lasting bonds in order to raise babies being born “premie” in order to accommodate a larger brain, is the most likely candidate for an explanation of numerous problems in human evolution. Rhythm, to put it as simply as I can, is common to speech, work, and the bodily experience. As a behavior that inspires one to “dance, nod, shake, swing, stride, clap, and snap” it also induces a neurochemical reward, while simultaneously bonding groups of individuals around a common purpose: fun.

As Gould, Ornstein, and countless others have related in recent years, the developments of evolution are rarely, if ever, causally related. That is, there was nothing “about” proto-humans that caused the early human brain to suddenly double in capacity. Rather, the capacity expansion was likely caused by changes in the ambient environment (Ornstein suggests a rise in the mean temperature on the opening veldts of southern Africa). Once the brain began to expand, its capacity could then be made use of in order to meet the next challenge: how the heck to get a head that size out of the uterus without killing the woman. The solution was a widening of the hips, among others, and the premature birth of babies. But premie babies require a long dependency and a concomitant increase in resource investment by the parents. Humans descended from primates that form kinship groups, and, as the authors of When Elephants Weep argue, the emotion we know as “love” is the glue that keeps such groups together. What ensured the success of big brains, premie babies, and the bonding glue of love, was speech.

Trackback URI | Comments RSS

Leave a Reply

Close
E-mail It