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

a word (pronounced “TAM-ber”) that refers to the overall perceptual nature of the sound. For example, a piano C and a violin C have the same pitch, or frequency, but they differ in the quality or texture of their sound, and timbre refers to this. Most objects have very short-lived rings—unlike the long-drawn-out ring of a gong—but they do ring, and once you set your mind to noticing, you’ll be amazed to hear these rings everywhere. And it is not just hits that ring, but slides as well. The vibrations that occur when any two objects hit each other will have many similarities to the vibrations resulting from the same two objects sliding together, so that we can tell that a coffee mug is being dragged along the desk because the ring possesses certain features also found in the ring of a pinged coffee mug.
    Hits, slides, and rings are, therefore, nature’s primary phonemes (see Figure 3). They are a consequence of how solid physical objects interact and vibrate. Although these three kinds of sound are special in the lexicon of nature, there is nothing requiring language to carve sounds at these joints. Dog woofs, cat calls, horse neighs, whale song, and bird song do not carve at these joints. Neither does the auditory communication of a fax machine. But if a language is to be designed to harness the human auditory system, then it will be built out of the sounds of hits, slides, and rings.

     
    Figure 3 . The three principal constituents of physical events: (a) hits, (b) slides, and (c) rings. They sound suspiciously similar to plosives, fricatives, and sonorant phonemes in human languages.
     
    Are human languages built out of these constituents? Yes. In fact, the most fundamental universal of human speech is that phonemes, the “atoms” of speech, come in three primary types, and these types match nature’s phonemes! Language’s hits, slides, and rings are, respectively, plosives, fricatives, and sonorants.
    Plosives—like b , p , d , t , g , and k —are found in every language, and consist of sudden, explosive, high-energy inceptions. Plosives sound like hits (even embedding their ex plosive hitlike starts in the name). Figure 4a shows the time-varying frequency distribution for the sound made when I hit my desk with a small plastic cup, and one can see that the hit begins with a sharp vertical line indicating the presence of a wide range of frequencies at the instant of the collision. That same figure shows, on the right, the same kind of plot when I made a “k” sound. Again one can see the sharp edge at the beginning of the sound, characteristic of a hit. (Also note that, in English, at least, one finds many plosive-filled words with meanings related to hits: bam, bang, bash, blam, bop, bonk, bump, clack, clang, clink, clap, clatter, click, crack, crush, hit, klunk, knock, pat, plunk, pop, pound, pow, punch, push, rap, rattle, tap, and thump.)
    Languages have a second principal kind of consonant called the fricative, such as s , sh , th , f , v , and z . They are extended and noisy, and sound like slides. (In fact, the very word “fricative” captures the friction nature of a slide.) And just as slides are rarer than hits, fricatives are less common than plosives. All languages have plosives, whereas many languages (especially in Australia) do not have fricatives. Figure 4b, on the left, shows the frequencies of sound emanating from a small cup that I slid on my desk, and one can see that there is no longer a crisp start to the sound as there was for hits. There is also a longer duration of sound, all of it with a wide range of frequencies. On the right of Figure 4b is the same kind of plot, this one generated when I made a “sh” sound. One sees the signature features of a slide in fricatives. (Also note that in English, at least, one finds many fricative-filled words with meanings related to slides: fizzle, hiss, rustle, scratch, scrunch, shuffle, sizzle, slash, slice, slip, swoosh, whiff, whiffle,