Text/Sound/Music.6

I think it's time to imagine first language and first music. You can get right at the heart of the controversy in this imagined moment. On one hand, you might think that music has always existed. The stars after all, have always vibrated, some physicists say in perfect rhythm. And language, if you are even slightly religious, has often begot the entire world. On the other hand, you might think that billions of years of sound preceded those first upright hominids, but only they began the sets of patterned, cognizant grunting that constitutes first language and first music alike. And it's no secret that the two arose concomitantly. Here's Merlin Donald, author of the excellent Origins of the Modern Mind, summarizing Darwin:

"He spoke of the refinement of the modern human vocal apparatus as a product of, rather than a precursor to, the earliest human vocalizations. This being the case, Darwin expected that the first use of the evolving new skill would have been in producing cadences, or modulations, that would have resembled singing more than speech. He pointed out that gibbons produced such modulations during courtship (38)."

The background is the evolutionary evidence that the human vocal apparatus was not developed enough for complex speech acts at the time our ancestors were distinguishing themselves from other hominids. Yet, at the same time, it is likely that speech and language were the chief evolutionary advantages that caused one group to separate into homo sapiens sapiens- we needed to embark upon language to become human, but we also needed to do so before we were quite there.

For our purposes, notice how the gap in the analogy of natural language and music narrows to zero here: "cadences... modulations", describe the precursor to both singing and talking. We would have gotten better at singing to get better at emoting, or intending, to get better at surviving, and the two skills would have reinforced one another. There was a lot of noise in philosophy a few years ago about natural selection as an intentional system. The idea (or at least the way I have it in my head) ran that, in an elaborate architecture that is looking for repeatability in traits that can sustain themselves past generations, there is a level of specificity that borders on a semantics. Out of all the infinite actions and gestures living beings could perform, only some are repeatable such as to show up in the tendencies of their offspring, and the system, natural selection, recognizes that in the way that a reader recognizes when a bit of patterned scratching on a tablet has achieved syntax or meaning. Indeed, it had to almost presuppose them in the instinctive framework of each being, or at the very least allow for them in the variations of beings that it was putting forth. Imagine how difficult it must have been to build first language before there was any guarantee that the next generation would be even as adept at vocal manipulation as the current one. It would be like trying to rehearse a band where new members showed up every time and half of them always forgot their instruments or how to play them. In other words, you would need both ontogeny and phylogeny working for you at every turn. In this light, it is actually possible to see why theories of divination are attractive, regardless of one's predisposition for or against them. What is more extraordinary, however, is to imagine the intentions of these first speakers, who were without that bedrock of reference we all rely on, truly or falsely, yet nevertheless had the seed of intention in them. Their utterances, their songs, would be desire's harmonic, resonating outwards in the hope only of becoming language in a future generation.