Sound and the emergence of mind

Abstract

Man’s domestication of sound in the form of speech has taken him farther than his mastery of fire or tools or any of his other conquests. It permeates them all. In other species vocal sound is a sparsely settled territory, populated by no more than a few squatters here and there in the form of instinctively programmed signaling cries. Man’s most distinctive initiative as a species has been the massive colonization of this territory with significances of his own making, references to an open-ended array of relevant but not self-evident possibilities, such as things as it is opportune to see them as having been, things as they may be but elsewhere, and things as we would like them to turn out; or as they may turn out whatever we do, or as they will not turn out if we can help it. With this potential, it is a clear waste of resources to talk about the way things are right before our eyes and we spend little time doing so, though conversation must be referrable, however indirectly, to the identity of the speakers involved and what their situation is, if it is to make sense. Speech articulates the social synchrony achieved through vocalizing and listening with an indirect claim on a realm beyond the reach of the senses, and does so in ways that are directly furthered by the nature of sound and our control over it. Since the archeology of sound has no subject matter earlier than the late 19th century, we are free to speculate that the first step in the campaign to dilate the present that led eventually to speech may have been some remote ancestral urge to develop more situationally specific, situationally adaptive cries to attract attention, signal mood, and issue commands or warnings (‘interjectional’ theories of the origin of speech are as old as Democritus). All primates have a repertory of such cries. A cry of warning, for example, could have been modifed by lips and tongue, once they had evolved the flexibility to do the job, into phonological variants associated specifically with ‘leopard’ or ‘fire’. The larynx is a relatively old idea in evolutionary terms, being common to many orders, but one reason chimpanzees cannot speak is that they lack the physical capacity for phonation that first appeared in man. This would be consistent with the idea that the cry of warning itself is an enactment of an encounter with danger translated into an encounter between wind pressure and the vocal folds. Just as leopards and fires are particular articulations of the broad real-life category of dangerous situations, so some aboriginal equivalent of the sounds ‘leopard’ and ‘fire’ would have articulated the general-purpose warning cry with patterns of subtle additional resistance, interrupting and releasing the stream of vocal sound at the surface