Spirals to Unravel a Mystery was published in two parts in: Quadrant.
Part One in No. 393, Vol. 47, No. 1, Jan.-Feb. 2003, pp. 71-78
Part Two in No. 394, Vol. 47, No. 3, March, 2003, pp. 58-64

(The essay was published without footnotes or bibliography, which are here reinstated.)

Abstract:
An extensive essay in 2 parts that focuses on counterbalancing the speaking tongue with the listening ear.
Part I. Literary and scientific approaches to language; Importance of auditory perception of language for acquiring the faculty of speech; Anatomy of the ear; Physiology of the sound process.
Part II. Focuses on the origin of speech and language; Views of Dante on speech; Identification of individuality; Core of Darwinian-based theories on the origins of language; Relationship of music to language; Role of listening & its relation to thinking; Classical Chinese views of language; Anatomy & physiology of the listening process as metaphor for consciousness.

This project has been assisted by the Commonwealth Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

Spirals to Unravel a Mystery

(part one)

“Their talk died down into a listening silence.”
J.R.R. Tolkien
The Lord of the Rings

A multifaceted jewel

Language is an abstract noun. Attempts to define its nature have inevitably led to circuitous statements that Steiner has aptly designated as “trivially deep” (Steiner 1978 p. 137 ff.). Statements such as, that language is a mode of communication, or Heidegger’s plea that language is language, can add little to our understanding other than make us aware that somehow language is more abstruse a notion than our common sense would have us suppose.

Paradoxically, it is our immediate and continuous use and contact with language, and this both within our internal and external worlds, that has a tendency to numb any inquiry into the diversity of its nature. At the other end of the spectrum, our expanding knowledge about languages other than our own, where even such basic concepts as “words” and “grammar” can only be applied by doing violence to the tongue in question, constricts us to such general notions of universals that we might as well throw up our hands in a fit of frustration and resign ourselves to dumbness. To ignore the various facets of this “jewel of the mind”, as language has been termed, is, however, to succumb to our presuppositions, which can be so ingrained that we only come to recognize them when faced with examples that come from without our cultural sphere. Poised on the brink, as it were, between speech and silence, might be what the LieZi intends as the best solution when it concludes that: “to arrive at language, is to abandon language.”

This refrain of Chinese poetics about language, has been used again and again in a variety of contexts, from philosophical discussions, to poetry, or in the Chan/Zen dialogues between master and pupil, indeed it has taken on an almost idiomatic identity of “to reach…. abandon…”, be it about language, words or the Tao. The more one attempts to grasp it the more it becomes elusive. With language and words, we can play; we can say that to abandon language is to arrive at the meaning, but even when such an interpretation is warranted, try to define the meaning!

Shifting our attention from the temptation to grasp language as an item and keeping our focus on the play of light that each facet of the jewel reveals is no easy feat. True curiosity, however, involves detachment — a decrease of our disposition to reach conclusions in favour of keen observation. Keeping in mind that when an inquiry into language is directed to a single aspect, the resulting view can be so unbalanced that the attempt to re-dress it shatters what insights it does offer and that categorical assertions in this field, more often than not, obscure more than they reveal; What is left?

Delving into the “nature of language” can all too easily seem to embark on a presumptuous, if not outright pretentious task. Nevertheless there is a vast body of material that does offer pertinent insights into the workings of language. The aim of this essay and the ones that follow is to survey the various approaches taken in the investigation of language — to search out the tendencies and patterns — this from both the scientific and literary domains, not with the hope of reaching a unifying theory or a single definition, but rather to explore the diverse facets of language and bring us a step closer to understanding why each of us, in our own fashion, grapple with the mystery of its workings. Be it in working out the meaning of a poem, arranging our words so that they reveal (or conceal) our intentions, or merely grasp the sound of a half-forgotten word. In each case, whether directly or indirectly, we are constantly shaping and moulding the way we use and understand language.

The literary and the scientific approach

In a monograph on the neuropsychology of cognition, Jason Brown defines our subject in the following manner:

Language is an achievement of cognition. This means that language is not simply added to the human repertoire but is something towards which the organism must strive. In the same sense, the words in an utterance are not the building blocks of that utterance, but are the final aim toward which that utterance is directed. (Brown 1977)

Likewise, poet-critics at the beginning of the twentieth Century such as T.E. Hulme in England and Arturo Onofri in Italy, maintained that language is not the instrument of poetry but its very subject, that it does not express a reality but creates one. Indeed one might argue that the hallmark of modern poetry is characterized by an active awareness that language is not so much the vehicle of poetry as the process by which it is actualised: to borrow the idiom from Hulme, the “transfer physical to language.”

Although such statements go a long way towards establishing an approach that might remove a great deal of dead wood from our path, it does betray the one predominant focus in the investigation of language; the predilection for the utterance. The bulk of this essay will focus on counterbalancing the speaking tongue with the listening ear.

A foray into the physiology and psychology of hearing is warranted not only for its own sake, but also because it might offer us a better basis for the metaphors that any discussion on language must eventually employ, and, perhaps of more importance, the process of hearing might, in itself, ring out the nature of language. I approach the scientific domains with a poets’ attitude, not in any romantic sense but in terms of exactitude. That is to say with a mixture of wonderment and scepticism: in awe of the minute details that careful observation has brought to light, and an automatic suspiciousness of employing the details to reach a unifying theory. The details make visible nothing more or less than the process itself.

At first glance the literary and scientific approaches to language might seem to be diametrically opposed. In the literary domain the word-smith’s concern with language revolves around how we weave a complex whole from simpler units. The scientific approach, on the other hand, aims to unravel the tapestry to find the single thread. Much like Penelope’s suitors, our irritation is likely to increase when we realize that what is being woven by one, is un-done by the other. The two approaches, however, are not irreconcilable, they can, and do, mutually inform each other. One could go as far as saying it is only by taking both approaches in consideration that a fully contextualized understanding of language can be reached.

Prelude on listening

Language is a human activity based on sound. Such a statement is almost akin to one of those circuitous announcements that, although means well, might mean nothing, like saying that humans are humans. But let us pause for a brief moment, and add that there is no human society or culture that has not developed a language: — which does not speak a tongue. We might even flip the coin for an instant, and add that nowhere on earth has a community of human beings developed a substitute form of communication that ignores the faculties of the ear and tongue completely. Given the range of human ingenuity, this is somewhat remarkable. There are of course sign languages, which have not only been developed independently the world over by deaf-mutes, but are also used by groups of hunters and secret societies, but they supplement, and to some degree, are dependent on, spoken language.

It is tempting, given the universal usage of sound to communicate, to say that it is as innate for humans to communicate via the medium of sound as it is for dogs to bark. This can lead into territory that I would have done better to leave alone, for it brings into question the idea that language is an artificial (social as opposed to organic) construct, some, of course, would leap to the idea that the universal (or at least world-wide) usage of language is rightly so, since it is God-given, the diversity of languages being illustrated by the Babel incident. Genetic science would also love to step in and claim that if language is innate, then there must be a genetic basis for it.

But leaving such quick conclusions aside, letting the idea spin in its circular fashion long enough might, after all, reveal more about the nature of language than one presupposes. After all, our contemporary ability to fly is a fulfilment of a dream (both metaphorical and literal), which is probably just as old as humanity and language. So in terms of language’s artificial construct, we need not assume that our most ancient ancestors were intellectually impaired. Nor are we the only species that uses sound to communicate. Human language, nonetheless, is probably unique in terms of the range of semantic loading that we place upon sound. However abstract the notion that there is a nature to, or of language, sound plays the fundamental role in its makeup.

Notwithstanding those born deaf, the auditory perception of language is our first encounter and only means of acquiring the faculty of speech. Listening and speaking are not a contrasting set of activities nor should the seemingly passive nature of listening be allowed to mislead us into a dualistic conception. Language must perforce operate on both levels at the same time; we hear as we speak, and this even at the most basic level as when we talk to ourselves. But we are so captivated by the wagging of our tongues that the listening aspect of language often falls by the wayside. If works on language aimed at general and specialized audiences often include a diagram of the larynx, tongue and mouth, the so called “speech organ”, few include the merest mention of the outer, middle and inner ear.

Dante accepts the stubborn prejudice, but he does so openly, as when he writes, “Nam in homine sentiri humanius credimus quan sentire — It is more proper of man to be listened to, I think, than to listen”[1]. The right to be heard, which often is no more than the right to speak, can all too easily become a hollow fury to vent hot air, ”Tu causes, tu causes, c'est tout ce que tu sais faire” screeches the parrot in Queneau’s Zazie dans le Métro, — “you chatter, you chatter, that’s all you know how to do” (a refrain well worth keeping in mind, especially so when embarking on the Quixotic adventure to discourse on language).

Short of fitting ourselves with earplugs, acoustic signals are constant streams that carry a wealth of information about the world around us. The mechanism of the inner ear analyses the sound wave into frequency components and transmits these to various parts of the brain. Over the past few years our understanding of how the ear processes sound has made remarkable progress but there are still many un-answered questions, as one researcher points out in discussing the physiology of the ear: “Only the barest outlines of the incorporation of information from the environment into consciousness is understood.” (Handel 1989 p. 463), this, of course, is true for all the sense modalities.

The faculty of hearing is such a constant in our life, that it is regularly demoted to the background, after all we can close the lids of our eyes but cannot do so with our ears (what happens to listening while we sleep will be dealt with later). To some extent, however, the low hierarchical status of hearing is a cultural partiality. To our Western predisposition for sight, as in the expression “all that the eye can see”, the Chinese use “ear-and-eye” to denote the sensible world and perception. Characteristic of the Western dualistic approach, but with genius, Shakespeare has Hermia pronounce these words in A Midsummer’s Night Dream (Act 3, Sc 2):

Dark night, that from the eye his function takes,

The ear more quick of apprehension makes;

Wherein it doth impair the seeing sense,

It pays the hearing double recompense.

Thou art not by mine eye, Lysander, found;

Mine ear, I thank it, brought me to thy sound

Hermes, from whom our heroine derives her name, is the messenger of gods and, as Hermes Trismegistus, founder of alchemy. The way our ears process sound has something of the alchemical transformations about it. Indeed it would not be too fanciful to equate the ear with the athanor —self-feeding furnace of the alchemists— in which the common elements are transformed into the philosopher’s stone.

Sound Metamorphosed

It is hard to conceive that in the vacuum of outer space there can be no sound. That two meteors colliding would not even produce the puniest audible thud.

Sound does not travel through a vacuum, it needs the pressure between molecules to expand and compress in relation to the vibration of a sound body, as two molecules are pressed together, adjacent molecules are expanded apart, and in turn other molecules are pressed together. Much like the ripples caused by a pebble in still water, the sound wave radiates outward. Although sound waves are not part of the electromagnetic spectrum (which by definition propagate as electrical and magnetic forces) all waves share some salient characteristics in that they need two complimentary forces to enable them to travel; where a change in one force causes a build-up in the other and so forth. For sound these forces are pressure and speed, a change in the speed or motion of the molecules causes a change in the air pressure and vice-versa. Arthur Zajonc offers an elegant description of the wave front:

Sound is a wave of compression and rarefaction in air. Speak into one end of a pipe and the wave propagates through it at the speed of sound in air. The wave motion is along the direction of compression. If a domino chain could be equipped with springs to reset each domino as it fell, the wave front of falling and reviving dominoes would be a good image of sound[2].

In terms of physics, Werner Heisenberg’s chapter on the relation of quantum theory to natural science reminds us that

Wherever the concepts of Newtonian mechanics can be used to describe events in nature, the laws formulated by Newton are strictly correct and cannot be improved. But the electromagnetic phenomena cannot adequately be described by the concepts of Newtonian mechanics. Therefore, the experiments on the electromagnetic fields and on light waves, together with their theoretical analysis by Maxwell, Lorentz and Einstein, have led to a new closed system of definitions and axioms and of concepts that can be represented by mathematical symbols, which is coherent in the same sense as the system of Newton’s mechanics, but is essentially different from it.[3]

Although sound waves belong to the Newtonian world and are mechanical waves, it is imperative to remember that nature is not a closed system. It is our inability to form a coherent conceptual framework that encompasses both the mechanical and quantum fields that leads us to formulate two separate “closed systems”. Sound waves, like light and radio waves, carry definite amounts of energy, (with an average of 0.000024 watts generated by human speech, it would take two and a half million people to keep a 60watt light bulb burning).

As we shall see further on, hearing and listening relies on those properties of sound waves that distinguish them form the electromagnetic spectrum, but it is crucial to remember that sound waves can be converted into electromagnetic waves and vice-versa. Not only can we talk via telephone and satellite to someone on the other side of the globe without it taking several hours for each sentence to reach them; the ear itself transforms the auditory input into electromagnetic impulses via an electrochemical process. The various transformations and metamorphoses that sound undergoes in our hearing faculty will be the thread into the labyrinth.

The outer ear is not a decorative appendage or a handle to tame misbehaving children, the swirls and folds of the pinna (from the Latin for “fin”, as that broad flap of skin-covered cartilage is called in anatomy), apart from funnelling the sound into the ear canal, acts as a frequency filter and provide crucial data on front-to-back and elevation information. Recordings from microphones placed inside casts of pinnae, when played back through headphones, give a strong impression of the sound sources being “out in the world” rather than internally localized. The whorls enhance the spatial origin of the sounds by acting as a series of reflecting boards placed at different angles, so that those sounds that originate from a given direction are distinguished and maintain an accurate qualitative shape. A mere hole on either side of our heads would not provide us with such a rich sound envelope. The ability to discern from where a particular sound originates plays key role in our use of sound to communicate and, as Hermia pointed out above, in finding friends in the dark.

The ear canal, a hollow resonant cylinder of irregular shape and pliant walls is roughly 2.3 cm long, has a resonant frequency of about 3500-4000 Hertz, and this matches the level that the ear is most receptive to. In essence, the auditory canal concentrates and amplifies the air vibrations that drive the eardrum: here sound undergoes a quantitative transformation in that the ear canal increases the air pressure up to ten-fold, peaking at the eardrum.

The taut membrane of the eardrum, which vibrates to the sum total of all sounds and can amplify the sound energy 15 times, converts the sound wave into mechanical vibrations that drive the bones in the middle ear. The three bones of the middle ear: hammer, anvil and stirrup, act as a series of levers (hammer pushing anvil, anvil pushing stirrup), that can further amplify the sound energy three fold. From the mechanical vibration of the eardrum the force is now a mechanical one. Two tiny muscles at either end of the bone-chain, restrain the lever system when the sound energy reaches critical levels. Pressure differences on either side of the eardrum are equalized by the Eustachian tube, a passage that connects the middle ear with the nasal cavity. The stirrup bone exerts pressure at the oval window of the inner ear, further increasing the sound energy up to 15 times.

The various concentrations and amplification of the sound wave from outer ear to the oval window can add up to an 800-fold increase in sound energy. The need for this increase is related to the fact that sound, on the other side of the oval window, must now travel into the fluid filled spiral of the inner ear or cochlea.

Nestled in the hardest bone in our body, the mysteries of the cochlea (from the Latin for snail-shell since its structure resembles a marine snail) are only beginning to be understood. As the vibration travels through the two and a half turns of the liquid filled spiral, an array of hair cells are stimulated and these fire an impulse along the neurons to which they are attached. It is at the hair-cells that the sensory reception of sound takes place.

The spiralling cochlea, no bigger than the tip of our ear finger, as the little finger used to be called, is divided into three canals, the oval window, upon which the stirrup exerts pressure, is located at the beginning of the vestibular canal. After two and a half turns, the vestibular canal gives into the tympanic canal via a hole, the helicotrema. Travelling back outwards this canal ends at the round window, a membrane that gives back into the middle ear and through which pressure is dissipated. These canals are filled with perilymph, a liquid similar to spinal fluid.

Between the vestibular and tympanic canals lies the cochlear duct. Therein is the mystery of our hearing whereby the mechanical wave metamorphoses into electrochemical impulses. The relationship between the two forms of energy can be equated to a reversal of lightning and thunder. The slow moving sound of thunder, after being processed in the cochlear duct, is apprehended as quickly as a flash, in a few thousands of a second, though the nervous system where the signal travels in a voltage range from –65 mV (millivolts) at resting potential to +55 mV at action potential.

Two thin membranes divide the three canals in the spiral of the inner ear, Reissner's membrane between the vestibular canal and the cochlea duct, which is just two cell walls thick, and the basilar membrane that separates the cochlear duct from the tympanic canal. The pressure applied by the stirrup to the oval window is transmitted as hydraulic pressure waves to all parts of the cochlea. The basilar membrane, narrow and taut at the stirrup end and wide and pliant at the apex of the spiral, acts like a string in a musical instrument in response to the pressure wave that provokes a ripple-like effect.

Due to the uneven properties of the basilar membrane, high frequencies create a crest at the taut end nearest the oval window, and low frequencies crest towards the pliant end of the membrane. The result is a separation of sounds, depending on where they crest on the basilar membrane, according to their frequency. The basilar membrane also picks up sound vibrations from within the skull and surrounding area, such as teeth clashing and the vibrations of our vocal chords when we stop up our ears for example.

On the basilar membrane, within the cochlear duct, there is a gelatinous mass, a sense-organ called the organ of Corti after the 19^th Century Italian anatomist who was among the first to describe it. The organ of Corti is bathed by a liquid similar to that found within cells and which fills the cochlear duct (endolymph). This feeds the organ that is isolated from the normal blood supply since capillaries would produce background noise due to the pulsing of blood. The organ of Corti is composed of a number of cells that support the hair cells and the neurons to which these are attached. As the basilar membrane ripples to sound waves, the hair cells undergo a shearing action that transforms the sound wave into electrical impulses.

The hair cells within the spiralling cochlear duct are arranged in a pattern like the bristles of a brush. Two types of hair cells have been identified, the inner hair cells, of which there are about 3500, are connected by an average of 10 nerve endings for each hair cell, the outer hair cells, on the other hand, of which there are some 12,000, share, on average, one nerve for each 10 hair cells. Compared to the millions of photo-receptors in our eyes, these figures are incredibly low. The small number of hair cells, however, is counterbalanced by a complex set of neural interconnections. The auditory nerve, which is composed of some 30,000 individual fibres, forms a loop, with each connection having a circuit that sends information to the brain and one that receives information from the brain.

The analysis of sound that takes place in our inner spirals involve a complex series of processes that not only analyses the composite wave into its frequency components, and transmits the information onto the various brain regions that deal with sound and speech, but also involves active processes that filter or enhance the sound energy of certain frequencies; notably those associated with speech perception. There is also a growing body of evidence that the process of listening is not unidirectional but involves information being fed back to the hearing mechanism. Of particular note is the evidence that the hair cells can alter their length in response to electrical and chemical stimuli, this would indicate that we do tune into specific sound sources. And, notwithstanding General Peckem, who “liked listening to himself talk, liked most of all listening to himself talk about himself.” (Joseph Heller, Catch 22), we tune-out certain sounds, especially that of our own voices.

Back To The Original Sound

As with all species, our ears are attuned to a range of frequencies that are related to our survival and communication between individuals of the species. Just as within the deafening chorus of frogs at breeding time a female anuran frog will recognize and pick a specific mate, and move towards him, based on the virtuosity of his call, this even in a pond that can hold several hundred individuals belonging to as many as 25 different species, so are we able to recognize human speech from non-speech sounds and recognize the voice of one individual in a crowded room at a party.

The sound quality that our ears can attune to is usually given in frequency, as measured in Hertz (cycles per second, i.e. the number of times that a wave’s vibration pattern repeats each second), and the volume measured in decibels (a logarithmic unit used to express the ratio between two levels of sound pressure). The sensitivity of human ears ranges from 20 to 20,000 Hz and is remarkably receptive to subtle changes in certain frequency brackets (i.e. up to 3000 Hz we can detect changes by as little as 0.5Hz). At the infrasonic level, “sound no longer has a continuous tonal quality; we do hear sounds below 20 Hz, but they resemble a series of independent thumps.”(Handel 1989, p. 65) Above 20,000 Hz the high pitched sounds are not heard by the human ear, but the world of ultrasonic sound is perceptible and even produced by certain animals such as bats and dolphins.

In terms of intensity and loudness our ears do not respond in a linear fashion. When a sound intensity (the energy of the sound as measured in pressure-ratio) is increased ten-fold we perceive the loudness to have increased by a factor of two. The end result is that when the intensity is increased a million-fold we perceive the loudness to have increased by a factor of twelve. Hence on the logarithmic scale of decibels (one-tenth of a bel), pending the frequency, our hearing threshold is roughly 120 dB. However, above this million-fold increase in sound energy we quickly reach the pain threshold (pending the frequency, this is set between 140 and 160 dB) and the hearing mechanism can be severely damaged.

Apart from the sound-processing faculty our ears also include the labyrinth, an intricate set of fluid-filled semicircular canals that provide information for our three-dimensional sense of equilibrium. Here also, it is hair cells, within the semicircular canals, that respond to shifts of the liquid, providing data as to orientation.

Although balance is treated as a distinctly separate physiological process from hearing, it is important to remember that we do use sound to orient ourselves in the environment, and that, in turn, sound localization plays a primary role in our ability to segregate the complex sound waves that reach our ears into distinct auditory events. Hence, both hearing and balance seem to contribute to our overall orientation process.

Since the hair cells in the cochlear canal being formed by the tenth week of foetal gestation, hearing is the one perceptive faculty that is fully functional at birth, the somewhat brutal practice of clinicians to clap hands to see that the newborn reacts, by a raising of arms, is the traditional method to establish that the child is born without any hearing impairment. Sight and the olfactory sense, on the other hand, take several weeks and even months before they reach their full operational capacity. Another quality of our hearing capacity is its recovery rate, whereas it can take up to 30 minutes for our eyes to adapt to darkness, the ear takes a fraction of a second (0.1 second according to Green, in Handel p. 65) to recover its maximum sensitivity.

To what extent we are acculturated to human sound even before birth, given that the inner ear is formed so early in gestation, is a moot point. Of course one is tempted to speculate on the primordial sound that created the universe, the OM, from which, in the Indian tradition, the whole of creation emanated. And, as one Hindu mystic pointed out to a French cardinal, even for the God of the Western Bible to have said “Let there be Light”, implies there must have been sound before light[4].

The magic nature of sound can only be treated with scepticism by science, or, at best, as a subjective acculturation of certain belief systems. In the literary domain, however, sound has an inherent power that might be best likened to a musical quality. Poetry in particular, can only ignore sound quality to its own detriment. As A.E. Housman points out in The Name and Nature of Poetry[5] meaning is not the only ingredient that is transmitted in verse, there is a physical quality to poetry, a stirring of emotions, that leads him to declare that “Poetry is not the thing said but a way of saying it.” (p. 37) Sweet mad Blake is one example in point, his is an hermetic world of sound, his work can seem, might even be, sheer nonsense, the power of his poetry lies in the creative genius that can build a world of incantation.

We can transpose sound quality to mathematical or numerical ratios, in essence veiling its “magical” features behind rational symbols (here we should remember that the diatonic scale of Western music is attributed to Pythagoras), the fact that our notion of harmony can be expressed in numerical ratios does not reveal the mystery, it gives it a quasi-grammatical structure, but the “why” and “wherefore” certain sounds and the relationships between them stir us, remains essentially magical in the various senses of that word.

In the Kalevala, the ancient creation epic of Finland, it is with song that Väinämöinen, primeval minstrel and culture-hero, sinks Joukahainen, his contender, into the swamp and dissolves his apparel.

     Then he sang his sword, gold-hilted,

To a lightning-flash in heaven,

And his ornamented crossbow,

To a rainbow o’er the water,

And he sang his feathered arrows,

Into hawks that soar above him;

And his dog, with upturned muzzle,

Stands a stone in earth embedded.

…..

     As he sang, sank Joukahainen

Waist-deep in the swamp beneath him,

Hip-deep in the marshy meadow,

To his arm-pits in a quicksand.

Then indeed young Joukahainen

Knew at last, and comprehended;

And he knew his course was finished,

And his journey now was ended.

For in singing he was beaten,

By the aged Väinämöinen.[6]

Locating the Source of the Sound

Charles Lamb, in “A Chapter on ears”  (first published in 1821, and included in his Essays of Elia of 1823), a satire on the lack of having musical ears, alludes to the appendages on the side of our heads as “those ingenious labyrinthine inlets -- those indispensable side-intelligencers.” What hearing does for us is first of all to place us in the space-time continuum. Hearing, as an activity, is centripetal—from the Latin: seeking the centre, whereas the sounds we utter, as a centrifugal activity, flee the centre. The centre, which subjectively sound seeks and flees, is the mind itself. It is the individual that hears and speaks, which, as Dante noted, is almost a species onto itself. Lamb’s “side-intelligencers” is more than a clever figure of speech: the position of our two ears gives us a range of information:

Sound localization in all vertebrates, including humans, generally involves comparing the differences between the sounds reaching the two ears. Such differences, called binaural or interaural disparities, are created by the different path lengths to the two ears and result in time and intensity differences that may be used to compute sound location. This computation is carried out in central auditory pathways.(Feng and Ratnam 2000 p. 705)

More precisely, the signals from the two ears first converge in the superior olivary complex, located in the olivary body, (two swellings on each side of the upper medulla oblongata where the spinal cord meets the brain). From here the neural pathways become more complex, the information from the inner ear seem to travel in both processed and un-processed parallel paths, that is to say that the original information from the cochleae, once processed by the superior olivary complex, moves onto various other brain areas, but at the same time, the original un-processed information is also sent to the various sound-related centres of the brain.

Although we can map some of the pathways that the neural activity takes, we remain in the dark as to the processes that take place and the nature of the “information” that is being circulated. The old analogy of the radio set continues to apply to our understanding of the brain: we can trace the manner in which the various chips, transistors or valves are interconnected, but it is as if we were unaware of the existence of radio waves. No matter how many times we take the radio apart and put it back together, we continue to believe that the sound is actually created, ex nihilo, by the radio.

Leaving the beauty of the unsolvable mystery aside for now, what we do know is that differences in the signals from the left and right ear along with the reflections of a particular sound, reflections that are near impossible to calculate as they range from a wave bouncing off each point in the environment as well as our own body (thorax, shoulders, neck, swirls of the outer ear, etc.), yield crucial information on location and the environment itself. It is essential to note that “reflections arriving within 35 msec are not heard as distinct, separate sound; instead, these reflections combine with the direct sound.” (Handel 1989 p. 82), it is only those reflections that take slightly longer than 35 msec that are perceived as an echo.

Sound, therefore, is intrinsically bound to time and the environment; a sound event must perforce take place over a given time, and it is noteworthy that compared to light which, from a perceptual viewpoint, travels instantaneously, sound travels at relatively slow speeds, 343m/sec (1234 km/hr) through air or gaseous mediums, and 1531m/sec through sea water, but unlike light, it does bend around corners and the time it takes to circle our head gives us additional clues as to where a particular sound is coming from.

Exactly how we exploit the nature of sound to determine the location and characteristics of a sound can be studied in isolation but science fails precisely where life succeeds. In a laboratory setting a given element must be studied in isolation if the results are to yield any meaningful information. Again and again, however, simple experiments have resulted in very poor performance of our capacities. Musically trained subjects have not been able to distinguish a note out of tune from one in tune. Native speakers of Chinese have not been able to tell their homonyms apart (and in Chinese there are hundreds of homonyms). Only when the information was presented in context, rather than in isolation, did the results begin to reflect our common-sense expectations. The musicians could tell an out of tune note within a musical phrase, and the Chinese could understand their language when the words were spoken in a sentence.

In the scientific context the number of variables must be limited for the results to be attributed to a given set of cause and effect. In real life, however, we are dealing with a potentially incalculable set of variables and not only do these variables alter and switch in predominance, but we are constantly interacting with those variable, for example, we might switch from listening to a speaker to looking outside for the dog that we heard bark, back to the speaker to find our attention drawn to some other auditory event.

Why it is so important to localize and identify a given sound can be illustrated by a simple anecdote. Often I put on the radio during my lunch break, usually it is tuned to France Culture, a station that broadcasts interviews and discussions, it is not unusual for several speakers to argue at once, and often I am reminded of the parrot in Queneau’s novel. But on one particular occasion, two separate interviews were broadcast simultaneously by mistake, for some time, and to my great interest, none of the radio staff noticed the mishap. Whereas one can readily identify the various voices in a debate, even when several people are talking over each other, when two unrelated voices are superimposed, I found it almost impossible to follow one conversation and even found it difficult to identify individual words. In both cases the source, albeit stereo, was coming from a single point in space (the radio set), but whereas in a heated debate, no matter how many individuals are trying to talk over each other, they can be identified and followed through various clues (voice quality, raising of tone, repetitive use of interjections announcing that a speaker is wishing to interrupt others, etc.), but in the case of the two conversations broadcast simultaneously there was no linguistic clues, two individuals with distinct voices were talking, each oblivious to the other. The sounds meshed and intermingled, although I could tell that they were human voices, I could barely identify the topics of conversation.

The “cocktail party effect”, first raised by E.C. Cherry in 1953, concerns the task of how we attend to and understand what one person is saying when there are other people speaking in the same room, but in fact the issue applies to hearing in general. Apart from the artificial laboratory setting, where experiments generally involve listening to sounds via headphones, in everyday situations there are a range of sounds reaching us simultaneously. As pointed out above, our ears pick up all the sounds within our aural reach, thus the sound wave beaten out by the stirrup at the oval window of our inner ear is a complex surge; a veritable superimposition of sounds that is meshed and interwoven into a single acoustic wave.

If our hearing were a simple passive process, then we would experience this onrush of sound as a constant noise. What takes place in the spirals of our inner ears is the beginning of a listening process, a physiological basis that culminates in a psychological activity. To listen is to separate the complex intermeshed sound wave into distinct events; to distinguish that when someone opens their mouth and a truck goes past, the roaring sound belongs to the latter and not the former.

Few researchers have taken the gestalt of listening into account. Usually applied to visual perception, Gestalt psychology studies how we perceive a given scene and apprehend a whole that is always greater than the parts. A splendid example of gestalt strained to its quasi-absurd end-point was given by a painter friend who recounted how, when giving some painting lessons to a group of elderly people, she was struck by one particular person who could not paint a still-life without representing each object as distinctly separate. No matter how often she tried to explain that the apple was in front of the pear, and that therefore only part of the pear was visible, the novice would paint the two fruits in an orderly row. It is as if the gestalt of the still life were being overcompensated, the whole pear and apple was apprehended even if one was partially obscured by the other and, therefore, the whole fruits were represented.

What happens when we don’t recognize a given sound, or are confused by its place of origin, can lead to tragic consequences or, in the case of Don Quixote’s night of terror (chapter 20, book 1), one of literature’s most hilarious episodes. In an article published in Vanity Fair in 1925, “The Adult, the Artist and the Circus”, E.E. Cummings celebrates the circus as a self-sufficient phenomenon — as a work of art in movement — in which the simultaneous multiplicity of life takes place.

At this great spectacle, as nowhere else, the adult onlooker knows that unbelievably skilful and inexorably beautiful and unimaginably dangerous things are continually happening. But this is not all: he feels that there is a little too much going on at any given moment. Here and now, I desire to point out that this is as it should be. To the objection that the three-ring circus "creates such a confused impression," I beg to reply: "Speaking of confused impression— how about the downrush of a first-rate roller coaster or the incomparable yearning of the Parisian balançoirs à vapeur, not to mention the solemn visit of a seventy-five centimetre projectile and the frivolous propinquity of Shrapnel?" For it is with thrilling experiences of a life-or death order (including certain authentic "works of art"— and most emphatically not with going to the movies or putting out the cat) that the circus-show entirely belongs.
Within "the big top," as nowhere else on earth, is to be found Actuality.[7]

Although Cummings makes no direct reference to sound, locating and identifying sounds is part and parcel of the extraordinary as well as ordinary everyday experiences. It is of central importance to our survival and functioning in general. The laboratory experiments can furnish some important details, indeed one might say that only in isolation can the details be revealed, but the “simultaneous multiplicity” of daily experience must be the standard; it alone can extend the reach of our understanding. In itself, to limit our discussion to the aural dimension must be taken as sufficiently constraining.

The space-time continuum that sound automatically embodies —the constant fleeing and seeking of the centre that we experience through sound  —gives rise to a concatenation of notions. The world of acoustic energy that throbs at our eardrum gives us a basis for understanding: a being aware of and interpreting the sound-events that ultimately shapes not only the nature of our being, but how we understand or imbue that nature with meaning.

If so far I have kept language, per se, on the periphery, it has been to explore how sound is not so much an abstract element but the materia prima of language. But the time has come to venture into the fearful territory that I have been so carefully circumventing.

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Spirals to Unravel a Mystery

(part two)

Language and the wheel

On the origin of language there will always remain a range of unanswerable questions. Was language invented extempore, or gradually developed from grunts and screeches, was it born out of pure sound and gradually meaning attached to it, we will never be able to know with certainty.

In his De Vulgari Eloquentia — eloquence in the vernacular or common tongue, Dante speculates on the origins of speech. Among the inane theological derived ramblings, he does make some poignant remarks on speech. At basis he argues that it is our individuality that requires language:

Since man is not driven by natural instinct, but is moved by reason, and reason, in terms of discernment, of judgement, of predilection, differs in every individual to such an extent that every individual seems almost a species to themselves, so that through his own actions and passions, as brute animals do, a man cannot know another.[8]

The idea that the animal kingdom does not require language as we know it, indeed that it would be detrimental to it, is based on the old dichotomy between the instinct driven life forms and the rational human. By and large, whatever our disposition, we can temper such a differentiation by reminding ourselves that at times animals have given evidence of individuality and qualities that we normally attribute to humans, and that at times humans show signs, for better or worse, of their animal instincts, but no matter how we shift or blur the boundary line, it is difficult to disregard the notion that there is something unique about the way human beings make conscious use of language.

Dante’s identification of individually (versus what we might call the collective nature of animal life) as the precondition of the emergence of language is an interesting concept. One that to some extent has found an echo in post-modernism, that predominantly French philosophical trend that seeks to remind us that if there is a nature to being human, it is that persistent drive to constantly mantle and dismantle ourselves. But leaving aside the temptation to make of Dante the precursor to post-modernism (and of his Commedia an early deconstructionist analysis of Italian society), the tale of the origin of human language can never be fully told. All we can hope for are faint traces and allusions to possible scenarios.

Over that past few years Darwinian interpretations of the evolution and emergence of language have become topical. Theories range from Machiavellian models with language posited as an evolutionary power-tool to speculations on the evolution of language emerging from grooming practices of present-day primates: speech freeing the hands whilst maintaining the social and political status-quo. At our present evolutionary stage, listening to a speaker would be equivalent to grooming the dominant baboon.

In “Comprehension, Production and Conventionalisation in the Origins of Language”, Robbins Burling argues for the priority of comprehension. Starting from the premise that we understand more than we can say, especially as children, and that as adults we understand words that we do not use, a theme that will be further elaborated in a later essay, Burling points out that even for the animal kingdom “signals become communicative not when they are first produced, but only when they are first understood”. For humans the situation is no different: “communication does not begin when someone makes a sign, but when someone interprets another’s behaviour as a sign.” in (Knight, 2000 pp. 27-39)

The sequence he proposes is one where ritual behaviour (i.e. the snarling of dogs communicates a readiness to bite) becomes conventionalised to the extent that a mere baring of teeth suffices to communicate the intent. Words then would be equivalent to a conventionalised gesture.

The classical viewpoint that ontogeny (the development of the individual) recapitulates phylogeny (the development of the species) is still at the core of Darwinian based theories on the origins of language. But in more recent times there has been a shift. In the same volume that contains Burling’s essay, Michael Studdert-Kennedy points out that as early as 1922 Garstang advocated that the development of the individual does not recapitulate the development of the species but creates it. Reversing the equation does offer some poignant insights, as Studdert-Kennedy highlights:

Garstang turned recapitulation on its head. Evolution does not drive development; development drives evolution. The phenotypes over which natural selection operates are individual ontogenies. Recognition of this fact frees us into a less rigid view of development, better suited to the diverse paths within and between ^languages. Language ontogeny may parallel language phylogeny not because the course is coded in the genes, as recapitulation would have it, but because it is implicit in constraints of hominid neuroanatomy and learning mechanisms, and in the logic of a developmental sequence from the simple to the complex. (in Knight, 2000 pp. 123-129.)

Nevertheless, apart from the problem of focusing, almost exclusively, on how we came to utter words, taking the perception and discrimination of sound as a given, the puzzle of the origin of language remains elusive as to its chronology. Various guesses have been advanced which range from as recently as 10,000 to as far back as one 100,000 years. On the listening side our ears are related to a line of dots on the side of fishes which pick up reverberations, thus our hearing capacity is firmly established as being as old as it can be.

On the speaking side there is a classic example of ontogeny insofar as our larynx and its position is concerned. In primates the larynx is located high up in the windpipe and prevents solids and liquids from entering the lungs. At some stage of evolution the human larynx was pushed further down the throat, the resulting streamlining of the vocal tract enables an increased range of sound to be produced. In newborns the larynx is located at the higher point, enabling babies to feed and breathe at the same time, it is only after several months that the larynx descends to its lower position (Aitchison, 1966 p. 81). Thus, the wider range of sounds that we can utter comes at a price, we can literally choke to death for our words. Fossil remains, however, have not yielded any reliable data as to when the lowered larynx began to be a feature of hominid physiology.

Recent research by Richard Kay and his co-researchers at Duke University Medical Centre[9] on the hypoglossal canals at the base of the skull, a canal that carries the nerve bundle that controls tongue movement, has revealed startling results. Analysing the size of this canal in modern apes, extinct hominids, and modern human beings they found that the size (relative to the individual's mouth size) of the hypoglossal canal of modern humans is about twice the size of those of chimpanzees and gorillas, the findings for 400,000 year old Homo specimens, 70,000 and 60,000 year old Neandertals, and 90,000 year old anatomically modern Homo sapiens specimens reflect a proportionally similar result when compared to ancient primate samples. This would take back the tongue’s ability to produce the wide range of movements necessary for speech to 400,000 years.

But to return to sound as a vehicle for communication, there is another form of human activity that is just as widespread across all cultures as language is, and that is reliant on sound —that is music. The two forms, in fact, meet in song. Here too there might be an ontological clue to the development or evolution of language. By six or seven months babies, apart from producing the usual biologically-conditioned cries of hunger or pleasure, begin to transform their cooing sounds into distinct babbling sounds. At its early stage the babbling sounds are culturally and linguistically indistinguishable, indeed even deaf babies, be they Chinese, French, or English will babble without anyone being able to distinguish their mother-tongue. But sometime between six and nine months the babbling begins to take on the feature of the child’s linguistic environment. Such features as pitch or intonation, rhythm and tone are the first elements to be distinguishable. David Crystal, in Child Language, Learning and Linguistics (Crystal 1987 p. 35) alludes to the fact that, as early as 2 to 3 months, babies respond and therefore can distinguish, such language specific qualities.

The fact that language acquisition begins to manifest itself with the sound quality and musical characteristics of the mother-tongue has rarely been taken into serious consideration. Linguistics, after all, is concerned with how we structure language and in terms of the salient grammatical configuration of a language, tone, pitch and rhythm have proven extremely difficult to pinpoint and categorize, furthermore, since they are not directly transferable to the written medium many researchers seem quite happy to ignore the slubbed nature of language’s “emotive” weave. But it is precisely the lumps and thickened parts of the fabric that lend language its relief.

Music to our ears

The interweaving of sound, syntax and meaning that language entails has lead many researchers to conclude that language is just too complex to be learned from scratch by every individual. Consequently much effort has gone into the chase for physical or genetic evidence that we are somehow pre-wired or programmed for language. Add to this the diversity of human languages and the pursuit had, first of all, to concentrate on the search for the core grammatical laws. Here Chomsky’s theory of a generative grammar is still the basis of most discussions.

One of the few voices that challenges the somewhat insular approach to the study of language is Stephen Handel’s Listening: An Introduction to the Perception of Auditory Events (Handel 1989 p. 184). In discussing the interleaving and interweaving of sensory information not being unique to speech, he concludes:

… I do not believe that musical production and perception is any different in kind than speech production and perception. I believe the commonalities are so numerous and compelling that it is counterproductive to argue that speech sounds (and language in general) are somewhat unique or that musical sounds (and nonspeech in general) are somehow unique. Rather, I believe that both possess the same structural features and that the differences merely represent alternative ways of realizing that structure. Both speech and music depend on the interweaving and the interaction among the component vibrations patterns across time.

In the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures that Igor Stravinsky delivered at Harvard University in 1939-40 on the poetics of music, Stravinsky calls attention to our ear’s “obsession with regularity”[10]. The search for rhythmic patterns is so ingrained that given the persistent ticking of a clock we organize the beat into a pattern of tick-tock. This patterning drive is not only proper to sound, as manifested in language and music, but to all activity, be it our breathing, walking, or heart-beat. Perhaps one can go as far as saying that whatever secret drives the eternity of the universe, it is born of repetition. And wherever we perceive repetition we conceive a syntactic sequence —an order or systematic arrangement of its parts.

The music/language relationship is a deeply rooted one. As pointed out above, music, like language, is present in all cultures and its origins are so intertwined with that of language that it is surprising that no serious study, to my knowledge, has been made of the possibility that language evolved from the musical drive to give pattern to sound.

On the neurological side, recent research indicates that semantic processing seems specific to language but that the syntactic and prosodic processing elicit similar patterns of brain wave activity as those found for the processing of musical harmony, melody and rhythm.[11]

The interweaving of language and music in poetry and song is almost too commonplace to bear commenting on, some have undoubtedly made too exaggerated a case based upon it, as is evidenced in Julian Jaynes’ chapter “Of Poetry and Music”[12]. The mnemonic power of poetry—the rhythmic organization of words as an aid to memory—however, is central, if not indispensable, to the transmission of a tradition in an oral society and will be dealt with in a later essay.

That composers, such as Tchaikovsky, employed poetic texts to serve as the basis for a prosodic motif[13] and poets, too numerous to mention, have used musical motifs as a basis for the prosodic framework of a poem, shows the closely-knit relationship and transposability between music and language. Further examples can be found in the talking drums of Central and West Africa, that employ a speech mode of drumming to communicate[14], and, in a more modern context, the mapping out of language onto the musical beats of rap.

To return to language, it is important to remember that, as Stephen Handel says:

… the meaning of the sentence should not be thought of as being based on the word- and sentence-structure meanings, with the intonation adding the emotional tone or attitude. Instead the words, syntax, rhythm and intonation form a gestalt, in which each aspect changes the other.” (Handel, 1989 p. 429)

In the end process any theory on the acquisition or evolution of language must not only offer a model on how we process language, it must be congruous with how we process music. To yield to the temptation to make of language a unique system that must have its own innate circuits is to make of an open system a rigid structure. The predominantly Western approach to begin with a specific or particular discipline and only take into consideration the wider spectrum at the closing stages of investigation can only lead to a frustrated or antagonistic conclusion. It is a case of cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face, defending one’s thesis at the cost of the matter under investigation. Stephen Handel, whose work I have been quoting and which has offered much of the basis for this essay, is not free from guilt in this regard. In discussing hearing he at times sets it in opposition to sight and, thereby, fails to take into consideration how we use sight to aid hearing and vice-versa.

Language is part of a whole —of existence itself and, if we must discuss individual aspects of its makeup, they must be seen as transverse sections of that whole. Failing that we shall forever be as the blind men examining the elephant, one taking hold of the head describes it as a pot, one taking hold of a leg describes it a pillar, and so on (oh! yes, and one took hold of the ear...)

Thoughts Beyond Words

Do we think with words or are words the clothing of our thoughts: the final expression of thoughts? Initially I tend towards the latter response. For otherwise, what would happen to thoughts for which we do not know or have the word(s)? It is inconceivable that a child would be unable to think a thought until language is fully acquired, if it ever is so. As children, the fact that we play with words —and that this in itself is central to the acquisition of language —shows thinking to be in operation. One might even say that without (conscious?) thinking language could not be acquired.

All this does not mean that words cannot lead to thoughts. There is an interplay between words and thoughts, one might even argue that the more we use language the more we bring that interplay into action, but that does not mean a dependence as such or in any absolute sense. If we invert the expression thoughts beyond words to words beyond thoughts a new meaning is revealed which automatically entails a new thought, or, one might argue, there needs to be the thought to invert the expression in the first place. And it must also be remembered that thoughts are not exclusively couched in words, visual artists can express their thoughts in visual terms, musicians in music, and emotions, such as our fears, joys, and apprehension, in themselves, can be seen as a visceral form of thought.

The question of language and consciousness is a difficult one, perhaps one that we can never expect to fully fathom. The idea that our mind somehow translates language into some form of mentalese leads us no further than saying that the mind of an Englishman operates in Chinese and vice-versa. There remains the same brink: a language and a state that enables that language to arise. In speaking of mind there is also the question of the un-&-sub-conscious elements of mind. While we sleep the auditory input that is usually processed consciously (i.e. the awareness of what we are hearing) is repressed or inhibited via a hormonal loop, a sudden or unusual noise, however, will wake us.

Language perforce fails us when we reach the threshold of consciousness. All that we can glean of consciousness is that somehow it must be not unlike language; an open system in which energy can be released or gained and that is ever alterable—a state of flux that is manifest to ourselves in myriad fashions but which we can only come to know from its emanations and of which we can never apprehend the actual process. What William James, in The Principles of Psychology, in discussing the stream of consciousness, calls the transitive parts of thoughts (with its end product as the substantive part of thought) is forever beyond our grasp: “… it is very difficult, introspectively, to see the transitive parts for what they really are. If they are but flights to a conclusion, stopping them to look at them before the conclusion is reached is really annihilating them.”(James 1890, vol. 1, p. 243 ff.)

The problem, in part, lies with our approach and conception of what constitutes “thinking”. Since, generally speaking, we treat thoughts as nouns (we can enumerate and classify them as one might a collection of objects), we assume that there must be a forging of thought in which raw materials are amalgamated and fashioned into the end product. Therefore we feel that we ought to be able to “grasp” the thinking process. But, as James so eloquently points out:

The rush of the thought is so headlong that it almost always brings us up at the conclusion before we can arrest it. Or if our purpose is nimble enough and we do arrest it, it ceases forthwith to be itself. As a snowflake crystal caught in the warm hand is no longer a crystal but a drop, so, instead of catching the feeling of relation moving to its term, we find we have caught some substantive thing, usually the last word we were pronouncing, statically taken, and with its function, tendency, and particular meaning in the sentence quite evaporated. (ibid p. 244)

Once we have taken speech within ourselves —and at some stage in infancy there must come that moment with its thought; that the sounds produced by the giants have meaning —and once we have made of inner speech a quasi constant attendant, it becomes nearly impossible to conceive that thought could be couched in any medium other than language. William James quoting from the childhood reminiscences of Ballard, a deaf-mute and Laura Brigman’s case, a blind-deaf mute (ibid, p. 266 f, and Vol. II, p. 358 respectively), however, illustrate the two points aptly enough.

Hear to listen

Did you hear… were you listening… have you understood? Every teenager knows that responding to such a diatribe with a vacant expression will result in the most exquisite nervous breakdown on the part of the enquirer. What one is trying to get across, the other is gloriously ignoring and responding instead to the approach. It is a language game played upon a psychological duel set in place by the notion “if you think I am the idiot you must be the greater idiot”. What is left unsaid impinges on the situation with more force than what is actually said. Often it is as if there is more internal dialogue than what is allowed to escape the lips. Every one is aware that for any given statement there might be a whole array of statements that have been withheld. “A penny for your thoughts” could often be open to negotiation.

George Steiner, in his essay “The Distribution of Discourse” concludes:

[T]he totality of human linguistic production, the sum of all significant lexical and syntactic units generated by human beings, can be divided into two portions: audible and inaudible, voiced and unvoiced. The unvoiced or internal components of speech span a wide arc: all the way from the subliminal flotsam of word or sentence-fragments which, presumably, are a perpetual current or currency of every phenomenology of consciousness, sleeping and waking, to the highly-defined, focused and realized articulacy of the silent recitation of a learned text or of the taut analytic moves in a disciplined act of meditation. Quantitatively, there is every reason to believe that we speak inside and to ourselves more than we speak outward and to anyone else. Qualitatively, these manifest modes of self-address may enact absolutely primary and indispensable functions of identity; they test and verify our ‘being there’. Taken together, internal and external discourse constitute the economy of existence, of our presentness, in a way which philosophers, from Heraclitus to Heidegger, have characterized as quintessentially human. (Steiner, 1978 p. 91.)

Although I would hesitate to accept a categorical interpretation of the primacy and indispensability of language without widening the “internal and external discourse” to also include strictly non-linguistic modes of thought (for without such a qualification we would end with a statement that implies that someone deprived of language is not human), Steiner’s essay broaches the internal dialogue theme from the quantitative aspect and reminds us that proportionally we do ‘talk to ourselves’ more than to others. It would be absurd to try and transpose this observation to listening. Our ears, and here I include our inner ‘psychological’ ear as well as our outer appendages, receive the sounds of outer and inner voices without being able to turn off. There are, however, some important aspects worth pointing out. In the acquisition of language the role of listening to ourselves is primary. Children, of course, tend to speak out loud, especially when left alone, and as one researcher has pointed out in a paper titled “An Output-as-input Hypothesis in Language Acquisition”[15] a model that relies on the child’s own production as primary input circumvents the age-old problem of how children can analyse and understand adult speech without comprehending it. Whereas by creating their own models and only subsequently comparing this to adult language do they eventually arrive at canonical speech.

To some degree the vicious circle of how children can arrive at understanding what they do not comprehend—how the tabula rasa of our original mind can ever come to contain all the linguistic matter that it does—is maintained by the notion that thought and language are inexorably linked, if we unhitch this pair then there is no vicious circle, thought would then be a free roaming horse, and language a vehicle obliged to travel the byways with its more or less established ruts. Language needs the energy of thought but the opposite is not so in any absolute sense. Once again, William James’ extensive quoting of Ballard (see note above), is well worth keeping in mind, for here we have a deaf-mute child of eight, who conveyed his thoughts and feelings through pantomime, meditating on the origins of the world and how the various forms of existence came into being before he ever became acquainted with language, as such, through the written medium.

Poetry, perhaps, can help clarify the relationship. Potentially any poetic diction or register can convey a given impression. A poem on death is not constrained to use images of a corpse, the sound of the knell or any other funebrial diction, any image or sensation can convey the poem’s theme because the meaning and the thought that it encapsulates lies beyond the words.

Hearing, listening, and understanding forms a triptych that invokes a range of physical and psychological activities. It is not necessarily a causal chain since each mode requires our volition and, when it comes to a question of will, the degree of attention that we accord to any given stimulus is dependent on a whole array of variables; we can understand what is not said and that which we misunderstand is erroneous only from a perspective which is not our own. Language seems largely to function on a subliminal level, the slips of the ear in listening, of the eye in reading, of the tongue in speech, of the hand in sign language, and the pen in writing have yielded a great deal of evidence for a variety of linguistic models of how language operates.

The revelatory title of Victoria Fromkin’s “The Non-anomalous Nature of Anomalous Utterances,”[16] the concluding paper of the volume edited by her on speech errors, speaks for itself. In every language, and in every mode of language there are lapsus. The fact that we tend to edit these automatically and hardly notice them except when they strike us as amusing or somehow telling (as in Freudian slips), re-iterates the fact that language is not a static entity but a mode in perpetual flux, a mode in both its musical sense: as a system of sounds, and as a way or manner: a means, form and custom.

The child who for years heard the admonition to be careful of the railway lines as “railway lions” was well aware that trains travelled along the track, but it took his parents some time to realize that his apprehension and awe of the forbidding strip of land was due to a different roar.

The quest for context

When we ask the Aristotelian question “what is it?” in relation to language, we begin directly with our subject, but in doing so we treat that subject in isolation, in a vacuum as it were. It is only through our attempt to answer such a question that slowly we come to realize to what degree our subject is interwoven in the fabric of existence.

But before we can proceed we need to seek out the assumptions that our enquiry rests upon. To some extent the approach is dictated by Western grammar. The underpinning implication of the Aristotelian question is that we are dealing with something: a subject or object, something that can be categorized. As stated at the opening of this essay, language is an abstract noun; that is how we distinguish a whole array of nouns that are not directly accessible to the senses, which denote an intangible state or quality. Music, history and difficulty are all abstract nouns while pigs, gold and Fred are concrete nouns. To what extent the syntax and semantics of our language shapes our approach can be brought into relief by simply asking “is language a noun in the first place?” The question does not query the abstract quality or state but if language denotes more an action than an item per se, then, perhaps, we should re-adopt the obsolete transitive verb form of language and say that in fact we language our thoughts, our emotions, and our listening.

In classical Chinese philosophy talk about language is mostly correlated to action. Confucius’s “rectification of names” is admirably assessed by Grant Hardy in Worlds of Bronze and Bamboo[17]:

Because we are used to thinking of words as arbitrary conventions only, with no innate moral value, correcting names may seem an unlikely scheme for the reformation of society. Yet Confucius’s word magic actually draws on a powerful function of language. Herbert Fingarette was the first to notice the connection between Confucius’s views of language and the ideas of J. L. Austin, who formulated the concept of “performative utterances.” These statements, which are more common than we might at first suppose, are words that do not describe a situation but, rather, create it. For instance, when one pronounces the syllables I do under the appropriate ritual circumstances, one becomes married. Similarly, the phrases I apologize and I promise are examples of actions that are performed by their being spoken.

The common-sense view of the social nature of language that permeates classical Chinese philosophy: that language binds and bonds the community, lead to the notion that language regulates the mores and civilizes. Thus, rather than ask “what is it?” the more common question about language was about which mode of language is most effective. For Confucius the question revolved around maintaining the ethical principles, whereas for the Taoists it was a question of being in harmony with one’s inner nature.

J.L. Austin’s 1956 lecture “Performative Utterances”[18] raised some key questions about the various uses of language and the need to base ourselves on every-day ordinary speech acts rather than some idealized notion of language. In challenging the Aristotelian foundation that still permeates much of modern theory on language and meaning (and that if anything, has narrowed Aristotle’s original thought), Austin proposed that we complement the view that language is referential and about making statements with the notion of the performative utterance which creates the situation rather then describing or reporting on it. At the close of the lecture, however, Austin catches himself in his own snare. The performative utterance is context dependent: one might even say that it is the context that makes the utterance performative. Austin is well aware of this, but then he proceeds to try and identify specific sentence types that are “performative” and here the trap-door snaps shut:

…stating something is performing an act just as much as is giving an order or giving a warning; and we see, on the other hand, that when we give an order or a warning or a piece of advice, there is a question about how this is related to fact which is not perhaps so very different from the kind of question that arises when we discuss how a statement is related to fact. Well, this seems to mean that in its original form our distinction between the performative and the statement is considerably weakened, and indeed breaks down.[19]

The problem is that Austin tried to make a category of a mode. His identification of the performative utterance hit upon a true insight that has far greater implications than the field he tried to apply it to. When a boy asks a girl “Will you be my girlfriend?” and she answers, “Do you mean it?” what is happening is an exquisite mating ritual that hovers between the performative and the utterance as statement of fact. Just as Cherry’s “cocktail party effect” applies to our hearing in general so Austin’s performative role of language can be said to apply to speech in general. In terms of sound all utterances are performative to the extent that they bring into being a speech act, in function, on the other hand, the weave of the ambient conditions and circumstances in which the utterance takes place, will determine to what degree the utterance creates a reality or reflects an existing piece of information.

What we understand, we understand through “context”. The word itself, from the Latin con-texo to weave or intertwine together and contextus cohering or connected, is sufficiently revelatory when we take its etymology into account. The interesting thing with pattern, to take the metaphor of the weaving one step further, is that given an overview of a pattern we can fill in the lacunae, and at times we only need a fragment to apprehend the whole. In listening, for example, where there is the visual as well as the auditive input, we automatically rely on both.

The most striking demonstration of the combined (bimodal) nature of speech understanding appeared by accident. Harry McGurk, a senior developmental psychologist at the University of Surrey in England, and his research assistant John MacDonald were studying how infants perceive speech during different periods of development. For example, they placed a videotape of a mother talking in one location while the sound of her voice played in another. For some reason, they asked their recording technician to create a videotape with the audio syllable "ba" dubbed onto a visual "ga." When they played the tape, McGurk and McDonald perceived "da." Confusion reigned until they realized that "da" resulted from a quirk in human perception, not an error on the technician's part. After testing children and adults with the dubbed tape, the psychologists reported this phenomenon in a 1976 paper humorously titled "Hearing Lips and Seeing Voices," a landmark in the field of human sensory integration. This audio-visual illusion has become known as the McGurk effect or McGurk illusion.[20]

Ordinary everyday speech is replete with idiosyncrasies, hesitations, truncated sentences, and pronunciation of a syllable varies not only from individual to individual but even from instance to instance. In seeing a mouth enunciating “ga” and hearing “ba” we correct it to the nearest likely candidate and settle on “da”. We can understand what is said to us even when the talker is chewing gum or eating, whispering, shouting, snorting or talking through clenched teeth.

As Yang Jiang in her recent essay on “The Art of Listening[21]” points out, there are three steps in listening: hearing with our ears, understanding and appreciating. The last step involves our critical capacities, and these pertain to the overall fabric of experiences. When someone says, “You know what I mean,” we are being asked if we understand in relation to something, be it a social, cultural or human context. We share not only a given language within a linguistic community but an ever-widening spiral that in its outer radius encompasses our relationship to the universe itself.

There is something in the process of hearing that reveals more about language than its cursory description charts. 

Within the tripartite division of the spiralling cochlea sound travels along the liquid filled canals with much greater force and speed than with which it entered the outer ear. As it ascends the scala vestibuli, goes through the helicotrema and descends the scala tympani, it is the scala media, the cochlear duct, that billows and ripples to the sound, separated and yet enclosed within the two outer ladders or scalae. But it is at the summit of the spiral that I would like to pause for a moment.

Helicotrema derives from the Latin helico, helix and the Greek trema, perforation or hole. Of course one would have liked for it to be named after Helikon, that sacred mountain in Boeotia where the Muses dwell. But Helikon (Helicon in its Latin form) is named after the willow tree, helike, nevertheless, the temptation to place the muses at the pinnacle of our hearing, can be forced by appealing to the common root of both helix and willow as that which can twist and enfolded upon itself.

We are surrounded and enveloped by sound. The spirals within our ears, protected by the hardest bone in our body, are the seats of our hearing. Lodged within the spiralling sound, which travels both towards and away from the apex, we ripple and billow both literally and metaphorically. Separating out the various frequencies and rhythms we garner and seek to discern the pattern being created before us from the skein of sounds as warp and weft are woven and unwoven. The origin and duration of a sound places us in a spatial and temporal relationship simultaneously in myriad modes. In discourse, be it linguistic, musical, or environmental, the stream of sounds are intertwined, it is our ongoing quest for comprehension that leads us to identify the individual strands and follow their tonal colour in the fabric of our mind.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

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