Harnessed: How Language and Music Mimicked Nature and Transformed Ape to Man (5 page)

With the two kinds of solid-object physical interaction out of the way, we are left with the final fundamental constituent of these natural events: rings. A ring is what happens to a solid object
after
a physical interaction, that is, after a hit or a slide. When a solid object is physically impinged upon, it vibrates and wobbles, and although one can almost never see these vibrations, one can hear them. You can tell from the sound whether your pen is tapping your desk, your computer, or your coffee mug, because the same pen hit leads to different rings; you may also be able to tell that it is the
same
pen hitting the three different objects.

Different objects ring in distinct “timbres,” 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, and zip.)

The third principal phoneme type used across human languages is the sonorant, including vowels like
a
,
e
,
i
,
o
,
u
, but also sonorant consonants like
l
,
r
,
y
,
w
,
m
, and
n
. Each of these phonemes has strongly periodic vibrations, and has a complex spectral shape. Sonorants sound like rings. Figure 4c, left, shows the ringing after tapping my coffee mug. Only certain frequencies occur during the quickly decaying ring, and these frequency bands are characteristic of the shape and material properties of my mug. To the right of that in Figure 4c is the signal of me saying “ka.” (The plosive “k” sound corresponds to the tap.) As with the coffee mug, there are certain frequency bands that are more active, and these patterns are what characterize the sound as an “a.”

Lo and behold! The principal three classes of phonemes in human speech sound just like nature’s three classes of phonemes. We speak in hits, slides, and rings!

Before getting overly excited by the realization that language’s phonemes are like nature’s phonemes, we must, however, address a worry: How else
could
we speak? What if human vocalization can’t
help
but sound like hits, slides, and rings? If that were the case, then the observations made in this section would have little significance for harnessing; culture would not need to design language to sound like hits, slides, and rings, because our mouths would make these sounds by default. We take this up next.

Figure 4
. Illustration that plosives, fricatives, and sonorants sound like hits, slides, and rings, respectively. These plots show the frequencies on the y-axis, and time on the x-axis. Comparison of
(a)
hits and plosives,
(b)
slides and fricatives, and
(c)
rings and sonorants.

Tongue Wagging

When the Mars Rover landed on Mars, it bounced several times on balloon-like cushions; the cushions then deflated, allowing the rover to roll gently onto the iron-red dirt. If you had been there watching the bouncy landing, you would have heard—as you writhed in pain from decompression in the low-pressure atmosphere—a sequence of hits, with rings in between. And once the rover found a place to take a sample of Martian soil, it would have scraped debris into a container for analysis, and that scrape would have sounded like a slide, followed by a ring characteristic of the Rover’s scraping arm. Hits, slides, and rings on Mars! It is not so much that hits, slides, and rings are Earthly
nature’s
phonemes as much as they are
physics’
phonemes. These sounds are the principal building blocks of event sounds anywhere there are solid objects interacting—even in our mouths.

Our mouths have moving parts, including a powerful and acrobatic tongue; fleshy, maneuverable lips; and a jaw rigged with rock-hard teeth. When we speak, these parts physically interact in complex ways, creating speech events. But speech events are
events
, and if hits, slides, and rings are the fundamental constituents of physical events, then speech events must
also
be built from hits, slides, and rings in the mouth. It is no wonder, then, that human speech sounds like hits, slides, and rings. Speech is built from the fundamental constituents of physical events because speech
is
a physical event. Harnessing would appear to have nothing to do with it.

However, when we speak, our mouth is not simply a container with a tongue, lips, and teeth rattling around. We are not, for example, making hit sounds by tapping our teeth together, or slide sounds by grinding our teeth. When our mouth (in collaboration with our nose, throat, and lungs) makes sounds, it is using mechanisms for sound production that go well beyond the solid-object event atoms—hits, slides, and rings. Although hits, slides, and rings are the most fundamental kinds of physical events (because solid-object events are the most fundamental kind of physical event), they are not the
only
kinds. There are hosts of others. In particular, there are many physical events that involve the flow of fluid or air. The events in our mouths that make the sounds of speech are events involving airflow, not hits, slides, or rings at all. Airflow events in our mouths
mimic
hits, slides, and rings, the constituents of solid-object physical events. Our mouths make a plosive by a sudden release of air, not by an actual collision in the mouth. Fricatives are made by the noninstantaneous movement of air through a tight passage; no surfaces in the mouth are actually rubbed against one another. And sonorants are not due to an object vibrating because of a hit or slide; instead, sonorants come from the vocal chords vibrating as air passes by.

Hit, slide, and ring sounds without hits, slides, or rings! What a coincidence! Human speech employs three principal sounds via airflow mechanisms, and yet they happen to sound just like the three principal sounds that happen in events with physical interactions between solid objects. Utterly different mechanisms, but the same resultant sound. That’s too coincidental to
be
a coincidence. That’s just what harnessing expects: airflow sound-producing mouths settling on just a few sounds for language—the sounds of physical interactions among solid objects.

We must be careful, though. What if airflow mechanisms cannot help but make hit, slide, and ring sounds? Or, more to the point, could it be that the particular airflow mechanisms our mouths are capable of can lead
only
to sounds like hits, slides, and rings? No. Human mouths are capable of sounds much more varied than the sounds of interacting solid objects. For example, people can mimic many animal sounds—quacks, moos, barks, ribbits, meows, and even human sounds like slurps, burps, sneezes, and yawns—that are constructed out of constituents beyond simple hit, slide, and ring sounds. People can mimic water-related sounds—like splashes, flushes, and drips—none of which are built from hit, slide, and ring sounds. And our airflow sound-mimicking mouths can, of course, mimic airflow sounds—like a soda pop being opened, howling wind, or even breaking wind—also unrelated to the sounds of hits, slides, and rings. People can mimic “hot” sounds, like sizzling bacon and roaring fires. They can even mimic the sounds of revving motorcycles, fax machines, digital alarm clocks, shrilling phones, and alien spaceships, none of which are sounds built from hits, slides, and rings. We see, then, that our airflow sound-producing mouths have a very wide repertoire, and yet speech has employed only the barest of our talents for mimicry, preferring exactly the sounds that occur among interacting macroscopic solid objects. We’re not, therefore, speaking in hits, slides, and rings by default. That we find these in all languages is a sign that we have been harnessed.

In upcoming sections, I will also concentrate on some other kinds of sounds our mouths can produce, but that language tends to avoid; these cases deserve special attention because of their prima facie similarity to sounds we
do
find in speech. Thus, they can help to answer the question of why speech utilizes some sounds we can make, but not others we can make just as easily. For example, we will see in the upcoming section that although we can make the sounds of
wiggly
hits and slides, we do not have them as phonemes—and this is consistent with their absence in physics. In the section following that we will see that although we can make slide-hit sounds and hit-slide sounds, only the latter is given the honor of phoneme status in languages (see the section titled “Nature’s Other Phoneme”), consistent with hit-slides being a fundamental sound in physics, while slide-hits are not. And we’ll see in the “Two-Hit Wonder” section that a simple kind of sound (a “beep”) that could exist as a phoneme does not occur in human languages, consistent with its nonprimitive status in physics. More generally, for the next five sections I will brandish a magnifying glass and closely examine the internal structures of hits, slides, and rings, asking whether those same fine structures are found in plosives, fricatives, and sonorants, respectively.