A Million Years of Music - The Emergence of Human Modernity by Gary Tomlinson

Author:Gary Tomlinson
Language: eng
Format: epub

System without Symbol: A Phylogeny of Discrete Pitch

The defining of protodiscourse and indexical ordering reveals that narratives making symbolic cognition the preeminent, definitive feature of humanness finally overreach themselves, obscuring the appearance of behaviors not specifically symbolic and oversimplifying the history of our emergence. The missed opportunity looms large in the case of musicking.

The symbolic leap to language, in Deacon’s view, was prepared in part by a decoupling of the manipulative meanings of earlier gesture-calls from selective pressures. In an analogous way, the foremost combinatorial aspect in musicking, pitch processing, could have emerged from the decoupling of prosodic intonational patterns themselves from their emotive correlates, as proposed at the end of Chapter 3. In the prehistories of both language and music, according to these hypotheses, distinct epicycles formed from earlier, selection-driven feedback cycles, and in each case the internal dynamics of these epicycles gave rise to combinatorial processing. In language this combinatoriality came to be embodied at two levels, in sets of nonreferential phonemes making up words (morphology) and in referential words making up larger utterances (syntax or grammar). In music, instead, the combinatoriality was constructed on a more basic set of percepts: discrete pitches.31

The perception of discrete pitch, the basic elements of which were introduced in Chapters 3 and 4, seems to arise naturally in normal human ontogeny and has no counterpart in the intonational prosodic structures of modern language. Though musicking can do without it—without pitch altogether, indeed—the vast majority of the world’s musics exploit it. This point can be sharpened: It is probably true that all musical cultures rely on discrete pitch, if they do so with bewildering variety and need not do so in every act of musicking. Even so qualified a generalization as this will inspire cries of protest from certain quarters, so we must immediately qualify it further. What is at stake is not an assertion that all musical cultures conceptualize scales, or name pitches, or even articulate the presence of individual pitches as such, or, in performance, practice anything very close to stable pitch tunings. What is asserted, instead, is that any act of pitched musicking (except in some very recent, nontypical outgrowths of complex musical traditions) creates certain intonational points of attraction for the musical activity and that these are not arbitrary. Pitches in acts of musicking are sometimes like fixed frequencies (with associated overtones), as usually happens in the Western classical tradition. But in most practices they are freer than this, functioning as flexible centers of gravity along the spectrum of frequencies around which the musicking is elaborated, like attractors in a dynamic system; or acting, even more freely, as a set of intervallic behaviors, in which only local relations between adjacent points are determined, without any overall consistency of frequency. None of these freedoms challenges the perception of discrete pitch as here described; all of them, in fact, seem to be founded upon it.

Despite all this variety, musicking ramifies discrete pitch in ways that are consistent enough to suggest structural constraints built into the human auditory system.

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