Bob Holmes, contributor
(Image: Jupiter/Getty)
HUMANS are very good at language. Computers are just beginning to cope with the complexities of speech, but almost every child masters language easily. This remarkable talent has led some anthropologists and psychologists to conclude that we have an innate "language instinct" - that evolution shaped our brains into language-learning devices.
In Harnessed, psychologist Mark Changizi turns this argument on its head: instead of our brains adapting to language, he claims, language has evolved to take advantage of sound-processing skills the brain already possessed. Music has done the same, adapting itself to fit our brain's pre-existing talents and borrowing - harnessing - them for a new purpose.
Our prelinguistic ancestors used their ears to inform them about events in their surroundings, and we are still good at this. Close your eyes for a moment and listen: not only can you hear a person walking nearby, but you know how close they are, whether they are going up or down stairs, often who they are and what their mood is, and whether they just filled a coffee mug or a water glass.
You do that by discriminating many small details of the sounds you hear - the particular "clink" of a coffee mug, the characteristic rhythm of someone's gait, and the like. Crucially, most of this discrimination takes place subliminally, before your conscious mind assembles and labels the perception.
It is this subliminal processing that spoken language taps into, says Changizi. Most of the natural sounds our ancestors would have processed fall into one of three categories: things hitting one another, things sliding over one another, and things resonating after being struck. The three classes of phonemes found in speech - plosives such as p and k, fricatives such as sh and f, and sonorants such as r, m and the vowels - closely resemble these categories of natural sound.
The same nature-mimicry guides how phonemes are assembled into syllables, and syllables into words, as Changizi shows with many examples. This explains why we acquire language so easily: the subconscious auditory processing involved is no different to what our ancestors have done for millions of years.
The hold that music has on us can also be explained by this kind of mimicry - but where speech imitates the sounds of everyday objects, music mimics the sound of people moving, Changizi argues. Primitive humans would have needed to know four things about someone moving nearby: their distance, speed, intent and whether they are coming nearer or going away. They would have judged distance from loudness, speed from the rate of footfalls, intent from gait, and direction from subtle Doppler shifts. Voila: we have volume, tempo, rhythm and pitch, four of the main components of music.
Changizi spends most of the book developing the parallels between music and the sounds of movement. He describes, for example, how the pitch of a melody "turns" at about the same rate as a walking human and how the shape of a musical phrase matches the sonic characteristics of a person approaching, interacting and then departing again.
This link between music and human movement explains why we take to music so readily, why it carries such a big emotional charge, and why we feel compelled to dance, Changizi believes. Music, like language, adapted to fit our brains, as our ancestors kept the features that "felt right" and dropped those that didn't, a form of evolution by cultural selection.
Changizi makes a persuasive case in this fascinating volume, except for one important omission. His music-mimics-movement theory says nothing about harmony. Why, for example, do minor keys sound sad while major keys sound happy, and why do we feel tension with some chords and release with others? Without this, his otherwise compelling explanation for music remains incomplete.
Book Information
Harnessed: How language and music mimicked nature and transformed ape to man
by Mark Changizi
BenBella Books
?10.99/$16.95
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