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Human Singing: Beginnings & Evolution

intaglio

Gone But Not Forgotten
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This thread was stimulated by an broadcast on Radio 4 this morning. When did we begin to sing? Not make music but to sing.

Evidence for musical instruments goes back about 40 ky but we seem to have had the vocal equipment to sing for about 300 ky. Paintings in the French caverns seem to congregate in areas where there is an acoustic sweet spot. and the pattern of dots in those paintings seem to bear a relation to the resonance patterns at those places. Newgrange in common with other megalithic monuments seems to be designed to resonate.

Mothers and children seem to communicate pre-verbally by musical cooing and humming - songs without words. Songs also seem to imitate the sounds in the environment of the singer; constant sliding scales for the inhabitants of atols, forest noises for the pygmy, throat drones for the mongol and eskimo (like wind blowing over the cold open spaces)

The emotional content of songs can be guessed without knowing the language, even something about the subject though this is easier with more anchient forms. Christianity places a high value on song, Boethius equated the soul and heaven to song. The Kalevala (Finland) and the Australian aboriginal legends speek of song as being the creative force of the universe.

Oddly amongst the great apes we are almost the only ones to sing. Gibbons are the exception, singing and duetting to reinforce bonds. None of the others of the anthropiod family seem to.

Could song have predated speech. What other religions and folk tales make so much of it? Any other comments. This has rather stimulated my juices
 
Verse certainly tends to predate prose and an oral culture comes
before a written one. The ancient bards would chant their epics to
the accompaniment of the harp. In a sense, song is unfallen
speech. The ancient Greek plays were almost certainly sung, though
the music has not survived.

Many people find opera an exotic and irrational entertainment but
for addicts it seems much more real and intense than spoken drama.

Whether every-day communication was ever sung is an interesting
question. Come to think of it, though, much of modern communication
is about making appropriate noises and people do not always look
too closely at the meaning. Occasionally, talking to classes of children,
I have caught myself out uttering complete nonsense or inverted
meanings. Now and then, some smart alec will be awake enough to
notice that I did not mean to say "Always arrive late for your lessons".
But mainly, providing the tone of voice is right, the intended message
will be conveyed, even if it is ignored. :rolleyes:
 
Some thoughts on singing-

In my job, I often sing to /with people. They are comforted by being reminded of the 'old songs', especially hymns.

My singing voice is not of the best, alas.
I once roused a lady from a type of coma through singing. As she was Irish, I sang 'Danny Boy' and was rewarded with a faint but firm correction- 'It's not flowers dying, it's roses!'
These were the first word this unfortunate lady had spoken for some weeks and she had been thought beyond communication.

I proudly reported this incident to her GP and he fell about laughing and said, 'What, YOU cured her with YOUR singing? Did she get up and run away?'


So yes, I do believe that song is a deep need in humans and is appreciated at our most vulnerable moments.
 
As a Westerner, I find Oriental languages very tuneful.

Is it true that the pitch of a word in, say, Chinese, can change it's meaning?
 
Yep. The word "hae" in Cantonese means "yes": if however you change the intonation, and then only fractionally, it means the female naughty bits. Apparently all Chinese dialects are mono-syllabic, so every sound has to represent about 70 different meanings or concepts - they rely on intonation and context to get their meaning across.

For more info on this consult Bill Bryson's marvellous "Mother Tongue", which examines lingusitics brilliantly and very readably.
 
That is the greatest thing I've heard in a long time. Waking a woman from a coma by singing. I also know some people whose singing will wake the dead. :D
 
And my singing makes people wish they were dead!:p

Carole
 
Have you noticed that some people are always whistling or singing? When I was a kid, my best friend's mother was one of these perpetual singers. And whatever anyone said in her hearing, she would sing a suitable song. For example, if you said, 'Oh, look, it's raining,' she would start singing 'Stormy Weather' or something similar.

And whistling, there's an interesting phenomenon. How did people first discover they could whistle?

Carole
 
". . . you do know how to whistle don't you, Steve? . . . you just put your lips together and blow"
Excuse me while I wish I could have an assignation with the Lauren Bacall of that film . . .

Sorry, I'm alright now, back to the thread.

Yes, whistling is another source of musicality, again non-verbal. (Have you noticed that, in the UK at least, people don't seem to whistle as much?) Please don't get hung up on words, think hebridean mouth music or be-bop as well. We prize people for having a musical voice. I don't know of one society where there is no vocal music or of any society (where we have some form of record {pun not intended}) where song is not valued.

Song must be one of the most ancient forms of expression, it certainly seems to evoke responses at a very deep level (thanks for that, escargot). We resort to it without comment, crooning to the sick before the invention of sound recording.

I suppose what I'm getting at is - could song, in the sense of vocal music, have pre-dated speech? I don't think that pre-verbal hominids communicated just by "ugh" or "grunt"
 
I can confirm from bitter experience how important singing can be psychologically. I'm one of those people like Carole's mum's friend who sings all the time, (fortunately for others I can actually hold a tune). Having had laryngitis for about 2 months now has been quite traumatic for me, so much so I've had to increase my anti-depressants. Music is nature's Prozac.:(

Big Dumb Bird
 
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