The Origin of Language is Music and Rhythm
Music Precedes Language
Music is a huge part of human evolution. Maybe the most overlooked. The rhythms of nature gave us the precursors. The birds singing, the waves crashing, the rain falling, the insects buzzing, the mammals calling. These subtle harmonies and even the strange natural discord gave us the foundation, the ingredients for the creation of language.
The evolution of language came millions of years after the evolution of music and music seems to be encoded into our genes. A feedback loop of sound waves and time shaped the current dominant form of communication. Some Asian cultures use pitch perfectly to discern from different ideas in their language. Ma and Ma with different notes mean different things. Perfect pitch is built into their communication.
Consonance and Dissonance are easily recognizable and across all cultures music seems to be a reliable constant. Listen to these note combos, you have an inherent bias towards consonance. Close your eyes, you'll instantly be able to tell when it switches to dissonance.
Sound Waves as Knowledge
Across all cultures on Earth, dance rituals and musical performance are used to express non verbal ideas and communicate a deeper kind of knowledge. Hunting and play, story telling and herding, eating and praying, courting and marrying. All these social aspects of life were expressed though song and dance rituals. Our ancients ancestors were most likely Singing Hominids before they were talking humans. Whistling and singing are still used today as communication in itself. It is reasonable to think that the evolution of the human vocal tract was based on adaptations for singing rather that speaking.
Check out this 4 min vid of Sylbo Gomero, the whistling language of La Gomera:
Music and The Brain
Our greatest tool in dealing with the randomness and chaos of nature is our brain. We have these novelty creation machines in our skulls. Adaptation to natures challenges is our number one skill set, but how did our brains come to be so adept at adaption? The traditional view is that language caused the rapid expansion of the brain. I think it was Music. I think the natural symphony flooded our brains with sound waves and the constant auditory stimuli expanded our cognition. Music and speech have similar cerebral processing centers so there is a link, but I think Music was the prime mover.
In music rituals, movement matters a lot too. Music was used to coordinate groups, to sync up the various members of a tribe and create a kind of social harmony. Gesturing and vocalizing go hand in hand with music. Tool making was also an extemely important part of our evolution. Some of the earliest tool artifacts are flutes made of bone! I think language developed after the sound wave knowledge musical movement tool making areas of our brains were formed. Language is essentially refined music.
Music is Inherent
Musical knowledge is biological not cultural. Cultures simply express iterations of the underlying structure, like a fractal of sound. Sexual selection also plays a huge role in the origins of music. Courtship Rituals might have been the first forms of musical structure in humans. We all know of the different animals and how they still use music and dance to find a mate. Humans still go out to clubs or raves or school house dance parties to find a mate. It's nature. Nature sounds beautiful.
From the natural symphony to the emergence of communicative vocalizing, from hominid brain expansion to tool use and social harmony, from courting rituals and underlying musical knowledge, it seems to me that music is the most important hidden variable in our evolutionary story. Music is a multi-functional expression tool. The universe gave us sound and we refined it. This process of sound wave refinement eventually gave us language. Within all of our DNA a musical code exists and it's absolutely beautiful.
To see a perfect example of the inherent musical knowledge we all have, check out this video:
Thank you all for reading, I love you all.
'til next time steemos, Love Waves...
I just bookmarked this post. It is the most interesting thing I've read in as many days. Apart from your mind-blowing research and references on the huge role of sound and music, something else particularly struck a chord (pun not intended 😂): @cryptologyx and I had an exchange in the comment thread of my post, I am an African Child... They say and he was bewildered at why Africans aren't doing enough to preserve their cultures and heritages, as he came to learn. When he shared this initiative of the Canadians to preserve their throat singing heritage, I was filled with admiration and envy. Now I know of "Sylbo". I am in complete awe. I've not figured out yet what I can do. I am just challenged.
Guess what. I'm from a very small tribe in Southern Nigeria. The Anaang. I recall how fascinated I was as a kid at how the petty farmers and palmwine tappers used a communication method I'll describe as an abridged or less sophisticated Sylbo to locate one another in the thick foliages. It seemed very intuitive. Now seeing a more sophisticated application of that technique make me appreciate its beauty.
Lovely read.
So sorry for the late response. Its an honor to have you comment on my post :)
Yes all these ancient languages have within them hidden ideas, different ways to look at the world and that knowledge is extremely important.
Thank you so much Akpan, your words and the ideas encourage me to keep on and become a better writer.
Very good post! I been a drummer since I was 4.music is a huge part of my life. This hits home with me. You got a resteem my friend.
Nice man! Thank you, never stop drumming, maybe we can collab some time.
"It seems to me that music is the most important hidden variable in our evolutionary story."
I agree and I love this post.
Resteemed!
Thank you so much!
You're welcome!
That last video gave me goosebumps. He turned the audience into an instrument and it turns out everyone was wired to be on the same page?? Maybe the double helix is really twisted up sheet music... :)
Yeah its crazy huh? It's 100% ingrained in our DNA and he was able to show it beautifully. Thanks for sharing that link to the radio show, really confirmed ideas I had about music and evolution. Thanks for reading and watching the videos :)
Congratulations Human. This post has been chosen to feature in today's Muxxybot curation post....*....@soundwavesphoton this is very educative and I agree that the origin of language comes from music...thanks for your post, upped. More success to you.
Thank you for reading. Glad you enjoyed it.
welcome
This was a fantastic write up, I believe it all! Have you seen the film alive inside, I know they use that last clip you played. It is about how for people with dementia music is the only thing that rattles their memories, it truly is a deep and primal thing. Don't watch the movie unless you want to cry though it killed me with emotions.
Lovewaves!
Thanks Julia, I'll look up that film. Thanks for reading and watching the vids. Peach Waves :)
Vibration is all there is!
Yes sir Mr. Spiral, you know better than the rest. You capture elements of this universal truth in your poems. Thanks for reading.
A quote that 'rings' very true comes to mind “If you want to learn the secrets of the universe, think of energy, frequency, and vibration.” – Nikola Tesla
Music = vibration
Yes everything is vibration, those sweet sounds of the universe are the best. Thanks for reading.
hey dude good post, how come I wasn't following you until now? Sorry for both of us.
You know I am still trying to get it together here.
But onto the subject of your post.
I agree with your premise.
I think you might really enjoy adding Terrence McKenna's stoned apes theory to your thinking.
(if you haven't already)
He talks about the specific period of two million years when our brains doubled in size.
A change which seems difficult to explain with evolution as we understand it.
(or at least understood it when Terrence was alive and speaking. I think his ideas haven't gained too much traction, cause drugs are bad and I am sure no-one has done a better job of explaining it since really. There's always interesting stuff going on and I ain't necessarily on top of it.)
He relates it in a very convincing way to entheogens and language precursors such as glossolalia and music.
Have you heard him discuss it?
Hey friend thanks for following and reading. Hmm I have heard of Mckenna, but I'll have to look him up and maybe find some of his books. Sounds Interesting. I don't think the standard science on the matter is very open minded to other possibilities haha, imagine teaching kids in school we were all Stoned Apes hahaha. But it does make alot of sense. Like the old Bill Hicks joke, we took some shrooms when we were monkeys, looked at the night sky and spoke "We're going to the Moon".
yeah, Hicks knew, although I am sure that Bill went to see Terrence talk. He did it a lot.
If you haven't latched onto Terence, you will want to.
Food of the Gods is a good book, but honestly, the best way to do it is to listen to a recording of Terence explaining his theory to an audience. They don't call him the Bard for nothin'.
Go to the psychedelic salon and search for Terence McKenna. The very first talk of his that I listened to, was the stoned ape theory, although I had arrived searching for Timewave Zero, for an exhibition I was in.
If you can't find a good one, I'll look for you.
But the psychedelic salon is a great resource, thanks to Lorenzo
try here https://psychedelicsalon.com/category/people/terence-mckenna/
also, if you didn't know about it, Jim Carrey is filming a version of Dennis McKenna's book "The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss" so he is about to become much more mainstream. Get in now, while he is still a niche figure.
Dennis is Terence's brother, and fellow adventurer. Unfortunately Terence died about ten years before what he had calculated to be the end of history, as we would be living in a time of infinite novelty.
Maybe he wasn't too far off