Contextualizing eighteenth century Enlightenment through the lenses of contemporary science

Abstract

Leonid Perlovsky’s hypothesis that music evolved from “a split in the vocalizations of proto-humans into two types: one less emotional and more concretely-semantic, evolving into language, and the other preserving emotional connections along with semantic ambiguity, evolving into music” bears remarkable resemblances to French Enlightenment philosophy [1]. It is surprising that classic philosophers such as Etienne Bonnot de Condillac and Jean-Jacques Rousseau were not cited in this paper. By the mid of the 1700s, in his Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines [2], Condillac depicted the earliest spoken languages as being composed of action-orientated vocal inflections such as warnings, cries for help and shouts of pleasure. They did not use consonants but vowel-like intonations. Condillac suggested that early hominids did not prioritize the invention of different utterances (or ‘words’), but tended to use a short repertoire of utterances with different variations in pitch and timbre in order to express different things. In contemporary music theory these variations are considered as important carriers of musical emotions. Also in the eighteenth century, Rousseau suggested that vocal utterances of early hominids expressed primarily feelings (e.g., “I am sad. . .”), whilst gestures were normally preferred to express rational thoughts (e.g., “Brrr. . . It is getting cold. Let’s make a fire!”). Like Condillac, Rousseau proposed that primeval languages might have sounded like melodies of vowel-like utterances. However, he offered an interesting explanation for the emergence of consonants: as hominids’ dealings with one another grew in complexity, spoken language needed to become less passionate and more precise. In his Essai sur l’origine des langues [3], Rousseau argued that the emergence of sophisticated languages was motivated by the increasing necessity for social bonding. Within this bonding process, the amount of tone variations decreased, giving rise to the appearance of consonants. New articulations needed to be formed, and consequently grammatical rules for making sequences of utterances soon emerged. As language followed the path of logical argumentation, those melodic aspects of the primordial utterances evolved into music instead. Music thus developed from the sounds of passionate speech.