Harnessed: How Language and Music Mimicked Nature and Transformed Ape to Man by Mark Changizi Read Free Book Online Page A

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    Nature’s Phonemes
    By understanding the different evolutionary roles for vision and audition, we just saw that audition is the appropriate modality to harness for language: sound is nature’s standard event stream, and language therefore wants to utilize sound to make sure language utterances get received. But what kinds of sounds, more specifically, should language use to best harness our brains? The sounds of nature, of course. But the natural world has a large portfolio of sounds it can make, and people are good at mimicking a fair share of these sounds, mostly with their mouths, but sometimes with the help of their hands and underarms. Saying that a well-designed language will use sounds from nature is like saying one had “a sandwich” in a deli. Which sounds from nature? Wind blowing, water splashing, trees falling (when someone is around), leaves rustling, thunder, animal vocalizations, knuckle cracks, eggs breaking? Where is language to begin?
    Although nature’s sounds are all over the map, there’s order to the cacophony. Most events we hear are built out of just three fundamental building blocks: hits, slides, and rings.
    Hits happen whenever a solid object bumps into another object. When you walk, your feet hit the ground. When you knock, your knuckles hit the door. A tennis match is a game of hits—ball hits racket, ball hits net, ball hits ground. Hits make a distinctive sound. They happen suddenly, and the auditory signal consists of an almost instantaneous explosive burst of energy emanating from the impact.
    Slides are the other common kind of physical interaction between solid objects. Slides occur whenever there is a long duration of friction contact between surfaces. If you drag your finger down the page of this book, you’re making a slide. If you push a box along the floor, that’s a slide. The auditory structure of slides differs from that of hits: Rather than a nearly instantaneous release of energy, slides have a non-sudden start and a white-noise-like sound that can last for a more extended period of time. Slides are less common than hits. First, they require a special circumstance, the extended interaction of two surfaces; hits, on the other hand, are what perception scientists call “generic,” because no special coincidences are needed to carry off a hit. Second, when slides do happen their friction tends to significantly lower the energy in the event, and therefore they commonly occur at the tail ends of events. Third, whereas a long sequence of hits is possible (with intervening rings, as discussed in a moment)—as when a ping pong ball bounces lower and lower, for instance—a long sequence of distinct slides is not typically possible; something would have to stop one slide to allow another one to start, but any such interference with a slide is likely to involve a hit.
    Hits and slides are the only physical interactions among solid objects that we regularly experience, and they are certainly the primary ones our ancestors would have experienced. We are land mammals. Splashes, involving a solid and a liquid, are neither hits nor slides, and although they could shape the auditory system of otters, seals, and whales, they’re unlikely to be of central significance to our auditory system.
    With the two kinds of solid-object physical interaction out of the way, we are left with the final fundamental constituent of these natural events: rings. A ring is what happens to a solid object after a physical interaction, that is, after a hit or a slide. When a solid object is physically impinged upon, it vibrates and wobbles, and although one can almost never see these vibrations, one can hear them. You can tell from the sound whether your pen is tapping your desk, your computer, or your coffee mug, because the same pen hit leads to different rings; you may also be able to tell that it is the same pen hitting the three different objects.
    Different objects ring in distinct “timbres,”