Noisemakers and the Sound of Understanding
Linguists, anthropologists, biologists, cognitive psychologists, musicologists, etc. have been debating for a number of decades now whether language developed first for human beings or musicality. Generally, a level of primacy for language has been theorized because language is seen as central to logic, abstract thinking, and intellect. Also, obviously (or at least most likely), music moved over the centuries from a vocal phenomenon to numerous technologies and implements allowing people to amplify and diversify the sounds they make.
However, from my perspective as a writer, it seems likely that both language and musicality are aspects of the bigger universe of human expression and communication. Everything we do as biological entities is a form of self-expression. In fact, that’s really the main thing we are as a species—self-centered expressers. I have a hard time believing something so important would develop in a simple linear, cause-effect fashion.
Communication for most complicated species is how they survive—from birds and mammals to insects and fish. No doubt then, human forms of expression and communication are what make us the complicated and insanely energized animals that we are. And so, sound. Words and language allow us to almost magically extend our thoughts and feelings to each other. But what about emotion?
I’m simply speculating in all of this, I know, but it seems likely that the use of vocal cords to make known one's emotions could have gradually morphed into singing and language simultaneously. More importantly, though, is the idea of groups vocalizing together (however imperfectly), making sound based on timing and mutuality—rhythm, beat, shifts in volume, and timbre, melody through repetition.
Out of all of that may well come much more than we consider basic consciousness these days. The capacity to vocalize emotion and even early notions of meaning, required as well the ability of others to perceive that emotion and to understand what is coming at them.
Those two things then, transmitting what is felt using sound and then receiving that sound and understanding it, would mean deep and fundamental levels of connection between people that we are now only aware of in fragments and fleeting moments—and in music.
That question of understanding tends always to be left out of discussions about the evolution of the human mind over time. Hopefully, you see a direct connection here in this modern supposedly sophisticated world we live in. We have a nearly insane tendency to be self-centered noisemakers. But we also need to understand each other's self-centered noises. That question of understanding is all about emotional connection, something I will posit here as much more complicated and unconscious than any of us realize, something that Sound Effect Infinity hints at, or even digs into in depth if you are so inclined...