Language 'just happened'

Hopefully this post doesn't loose all credibility based on your perception of my taste in music. I admit it, I am huge fan of Bright Eyes. Conor Oberst is a thoughtful songwriter and I consider him to be quite poetic at times. I was driving the other day and his live album 'Motion Sickness' was swooning me on my drive home. The song 'Scale' on said album [originally on 'Fevers and Mirrors'] had a line that I thought totally relavant to our class and the subject of the origin of language.
"Language just happened, it was never planned. Now it's inadequate to describe where I am..."
As I thought about the discussions we have had about Rosseau's theory, as well as Herder's, I thought Mr. Oberst's definition was also a nice addition. Language seems to be so innate, yet often times, words are imperfect.
A friend of mine once stopped listening to all music that contained words. He thought words ruined the natural beauty of music. He only listened to classical composers and orchestral works. He took it even further to stop watching movies because there was undoubtedly going to be a soundtrack that was not in line with his standard for music.
During his 'fast,' if you will, we had many discussions about music. I realized that the reason I care so much for music is because of the words. I love poetry set to a gentle melody that for me creates an even more meaningful experience than if I were to merely read it.
As my friend simply stated it, "You love words too damn much."
But I'll admit, I am pretty guilty of that.

YOU/USED T O _B E A_LR IGHT WHAT/HA _PPENED ?

Quick thought about Music as language (or as a form of communication).

Two weeks ago I traveled almost 1,000 miles to see a (Radiohead) concert. In preparation for such an event, my girlfriend (Paige) and I spent 5 months saving up over $2,000. It took us 15 hours to drive from Orem, UT to Auburn, WA and while waiting for the band to finally come out onto the stage I realized something. This 2,000 dollars, this 1,000 miles, this 15 hours of driving, this 150 days of waiting--all of this--it all came down to a little blurb of time that would seem to end before it began. I asked Paige if she thought it was odd, so many hours of driving, waiting, working to save money... and all of it just to experience 2 hours of music. But as we discussed this I began to look around and I realized something. It wasn't just us, there were thousands of other people on the edge of their seats, each anticipating the same thing: music. Who knows if they drove from 15 blocks away or 15 states away. It didn't matter. There were thousands of people lined up for one reason. And when the first note resonated throughout the arena, thousands of people simultaneously sprang to their feet and collectively erupted like a volcano of voice.

Nobody told any of these people to show up here. Nobody told us to scream, shout, or dance. It was simply understood.

Music not only has the ability to inspire a human being to wait 5 months, save 2,000 dollars, drive 15 hours/1,000 miles, etc. just to experience it first hand; it also has the ability to communicate with thousands of people simultaneously. The majority of the audience surely can not play instruments the way the band can, nor do most of the people watching understand how the band plays their instruments in such a way... but it doesn't matter. All that mattered was the rhythmic conversation between multiple notes and multiple people. The instruments shouting to the crowd and vice versa.

Essential Tones Of Music Rooted In Human Speech

From Therapy Times:

The use of 12 tone intervals in the music of many human cultures is rooted in the physics of how our vocal anatomy produces speech, according to researchers at the Duke University Center for Cognitive Neuroscience.

The particular notes used in music sound right to our ears because of the way our vocal apparatus makes the sounds used in all human languages, says Dale Purves, the George Barth Geller Professor for Research in Neurobiology.

It's not something one can hear directly, but when the sounds of speech are looked at with a spectrum analyzer, the relationships between the various frequencies that a speaker uses to make vowel sounds correspond neatly with the relationships between notes of the 12-tone chromatic scale of music, Purves says.

The work appeared in a recent issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Purves and co-authors Deborah Ross and Jonathan Choi tested their idea by recording native English and Mandarin Chinese speakers uttering vowel sounds in both single words and a series of short monologues. They then compared the vocal frequency ratios to the numerical ratios that define notes in music.

Human vocalization begins with the vocal cords in the larynx (the Adam's apple in the neck), which create a series of resonant power peaks in a stream of air coming up from the lungs. These power peaks are then modified in a spectacular variety of ways by the changing shape of the soft palate, tongue, lips and other parts of the vocal tract. Our vocal anatomy is rather like an organ pipe that can be pinched, stretched and widened on the fly, Purves says. English speakers generate about 50 different speech sounds this way.

Yet despite the wide variation in individual human anatomy, the speech sounds produced by different speakers and languages produce the same variety of vocal tract resonance ratios, Purves says.

The lowest two of these vocal tract resonances, called formants, account for the vowel sounds in speech. "Take away the first two formants and you can't understand what a person is saying," Purves says. The frequency of the first formant is between 200 and 1,000 cycles per second (hertz) and the second formant between 800 and 3,000 hertz.

When the Duke researchers looked at the ratios of the first two formants in speech spectra, they found that the ratios formed musical relationships. For example, the relationship of the first two formants in the English vowel /a/, as in "bod," might correspond with the musical interval between C and A on a piano keyboard.

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