Singing to Aurora:
The Early Origins of Music

February 25, 2007

Continuing my interest in paleolithic parenting methods, I recently started reading Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind, and Body by Steven Mithen. It has been humorous the way Emily and I keep coming up with the same conclusions about child rearing.. she from reading Dr. Sears and ideas about attachment parenting and I from books about human origins. Here is a sentence that shows what I mean:

Demand-feeding—feeding whenever the baby cries for food—is pervasive in all traditional societies and requires close contact between mother and infant all day and night; its approved absence in modern Western society is quite peculiar. [201]

Attachment parenting is a return to traditional parenting methods.. and as far as I am concerned the more paleolithic the better.

I have been fascinated by little Aurora's response to music. Here is this little wee thing, and from the first week of her life she could be calmed by music. That discovery has served me well, as there are always times when Emily needs to run to the grocery store or to the library.. and I am sitting there with a baby who inevitably starts to fuss as soon as the door shuts. Luckily I know just the thing to do.. and I can almost always get her to calm down or even fall asleep if I just sing. She seems to really like the Beach Boys.. and below I have some video of me sending her to sleep with some singing and dancing:

Other times I sing to her unaccompanied, and at those times she gets to hear all the bits of Beatles songs that I can recall.. with Hey Jude and Yesterday in heavy rotation.

But how can these melodies mean anything to Aurora? It seems obvious that the human mind is programmed to appreciate music. After all, our dog never responds to music.. he just lies there. Aurora pops out of the womb and feels music. And this is the point of departure for Mithen's book. Past theories of language and the mind have taken music to be something extra.. a spin-off from our more important communication skills. Experience with children, however, points to the fact that music is something basic and deep..

I remember years ago talking to my musician friend John Browning. He made the case that there is something mysterious about human responses to major and minor keys. There is something inside us that knows intuitively how to respond emotionally to musical modes. John's ideas go back to the Greeks.. who were similarly fascinated by our recognition and feeling for intervals of sound. After reading Mithen's book, this human connection to music seems less mystical. The following is his account of the social musical expression of early hominids:

...hominids would have begun to express their own emotions and to attempt to induce particular emotions in others, by means of vocalizations having greater acoustic variability than is found among the African apes. It is even conceivable that they utilized some of the specific pitch patterns that appear to induce particular emotions in modern humans... [136]

So there is a possible answer as to why we respond as we do to musical modes. Those modes have come down to us from a long time back. These sounds were keyed to our emotions in the course of our evolution into modern humans.

If you were to account for the origin of language and words, one way to think about its growth would be to hypothesize that humans began with a handful of signifying words.. probably important nouns. Then you can imagine the rudimentary grammar that would come into play once verbs came into use.. and from there a more and more complex grammar would take shape. Mithen (building on the earlier work of Alison Wray) believes that early language development was not at all like this. It can better be imagined as "Hmmmm".. that is, Holistic Manipulative, Multi-Modal, Musical, and Mimetic. There would be nothing symbolic or representational about this early form of communication.. no grammar. It would be entirely dependent on context and aimed at getting someone to do something.

In Mithen's view there came a time when language proper developed among homo sapiens. From that time on there was an ever greater dependence on linguistic ability.. and music branched into its own separate skill, distinct from language but retaining the ability to communicate emotions as did the earlier Hmmmm.

At certain points in human development we can still catch sight of this earlier mode of communication.. this Hmmmm. Perhaps our best view comes when we observe what we think of as baby talk.. or "infant-directed speech". This is a place where we betray that we are yet masters of Hmmmm. Baby talk is automatically adopted by people of all ages when addressing babies.. and this holds true across cultures as well. In these cases we are not communicating words and ideas.. but an emotion of love and acceptance. As we know, this baby talk can easily give way to singing.. and that is perhaps the easiest way for us to put ourselves into the mind of a Neanderthal!