Introduction

Abstract

It is the project of this book to explore the common ground between speech, music and other sounds. These three have usually been treated as separate, in theory as well as in practice. They have been talked about in different ways and with different terminologies: linguistics to talk about speech; musicology to talk about music; not much at all to talk about ‘sound effects’. And they have been practised as separate disciplines too, especially in dominant modes of communication and high culture art forms. This kind of semiotic purism has not always existed. In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance the voice was still a musical instrument and music was embedded in every aspect of everyday life, just as many ‘less developed’ cultures had and still have songs for grinding grains, songs for harvesting crops, songs for constructing houses, songs for carrying goods, toilet training songs, puberty songs, news bulletin songs, political comment songs, and so on (cf. Merriam, 1964). But as clergical plainsong, the cries of night-watchmen, and the chanting of the ABC in schools were replaced by reading aloud, speech was divorced from music, and much flattened in the process. And as the musical sounds in our cities (church bells, the postman’s horn, and so on) were replaced by mechanical noises, with music moving indoors, into the concert hall, music and ‘noise’, too, became separate categories: ‘The string quartet and urban pandemonium are historically contemporaneous’ (Schafer, 1977: 103).