Music & Language: Parallels & Divergences
Attached are lecture notes, and the PowerPoint slide show from the talk “Music & Language: Parallels & Divergences” which was presented to the Cognitive and Perceptual Sciences (CaPS) at the University of California, Santa Barbara, on November 30, 2001.
brucerichman said,
December 5, 2006 @ 1:32 pm
Bruce Richman wrote:
Hi Jonathan,
I read your talk on Parallels and Divergences of music and language and I really think it’s great! It parallels a lot of my thinking and what I’m writing in my origins of language book. The big thing missing in most people’s thinking about music and language is to be clear exactly what these social, collective behaviors really are. As social behaviors they merely are points on a continuum of collective human vocal behavior. In Plato’s The Laws he says that mousike is the collective, rhythmical behavior of groups of people, coordinated movements of the body, including the voice! Dance, song, gesture language, and spoken language all fit that definition!
One minor quibble: you say that animals don’t show that they can produce and imitate arbitrary rhythmic patterns. That may be true; but some animals, particularly gelada baboons (whose vocalization patterns I studied for years) and some duetting and group singing songbirds, produce complicated vocal patterns whose rhythms other voices, other baboons and birds, try to follow along with and imitate, synchronize with, and alternate their rhythmic contributions with. You definitely see the beginnings of collective rhythmic behavior in these animals.
Anyway, hoping to hear from you, Bruce
Jonathan G. Secora Pearl said,
December 5, 2006 @ 1:41 pm
Hi Bruce,
Thanks for the comments. Having never yet done work with other primates, I must defer to those who have. I was citing Merlin Donald\’s comments. I still need to read his more recent \”A Mind So Rare\” which I hear fills out his thinking on that point a bit more. What you say about gelada baboons is intriguing. On a related point, Don Hodges showed a video tape of a chimpanzee (I think) playing a scale on an electronic keyboard (as part of some project by Peter Gabriel, I believe), and pausing rather committedly on the tonic.
From what I can tell many of the studies and experiments that would be able to answer questions regarding the capacities of other animals have not yet been systematically done. As I suggested in this talk as comparison to the various chimp-language experiments, we should conduct a project putting primates in an Orff studio of sorts, to see what they come up with. Maybe Merlin Donald is wrong.