Sing, Sing, Sing
Music and Its Memories
Recent Publications of Special Interest
Research indicates that singing has a strong biological basis,
appears as song babbling in infants, undergoes regular developmental
stages in young children and can facilitate cognitive abilities.
Birds do! Bugs do it! Even gibbons in the trees do it! Let's do it. Let's .... sing, sing, sing!
Many readers will recognize this as a paraphrase of a popular song of long ago -- Let's Fall In Love". While sex may be almost universal in the Animal Kingdom (don't forget the creatures that don't need a partner to reproduce), love as an almost universal is not so clear. In fact, singing might be more widespread than love.
However, many would disagree. This point of view dismisses grasshopper song as just so much noise, holds that whale singing isn't really all that musical and even regards birdsong as just pleasant twittering. Dismissal of animal song as not being "genuine singing" is typically homocentric. One would have thought the fact that humans are not the center of the Universe, nor our Milky Way galaxy, not our Solar System, not even this "third rock from the sun" should bring at least a moment's pause, if not a bit of humble reflection. The claim that only humans really sing at least raises the question of the definition of singing. Without getting deeply into this issue, we might at least note that research has detailed the musical aspects of the rhythmic/melodic vocalizations of countless species.
Analysis of the animal vocalizations termed "singing" amply attests to their complexity. For, example birdsong is intricate in content and pattern.(1) And interestingly, birdsong is believed by many scientists to provide "... the most adequate model for studying the learning processes of human language." Paralleling the case of human language, songbirds also must hear vocalizations to learn to sing and do so within a critical period of development in order to attain competency. Additionally, birdsong is used to communicate quite specific information to other birds of the same species. Further, different discrete groups of brain cells in songbirds are responsible for different aspects of learning to sing and producing song, as appears to be the case in humans.(2) So there are many commonalties between birdsong and human language.
A second and last example is that of the vocalizations of our primate cousin, the gibbon. These are of sufficient complexity to warrant the term "song" without any great stretch of either the imagination or the language. Thus, the songs of male gibbons are organized "... within a framework of rules that define regular patterns in the placement and order of note types." When the meaning of such songs was determined behaviorally, it was discovered that the "... proper sequential organization of notes is required to encode the meaning of the song...".(3) Don't our songs have similar, if not identical, characteristics?
Neither example is intended to suggest that human song evolved directly from either songbirds or gibbons; neither of these taxa constitute our direct ancestors. Rather, such findings suggest that human singing is not unique and that it may be biologically based, perhaps in the sense that the hominid capacity for song may have had some selective advantage in the passing on of one's genes. This possibility aside, some workers view song as a stage in the evolution of language. Thus, Bruce Richman, writing in the journal Contemporary Anthropology, notes that many researchers categorize human vocalization into two opposed systems, expressive sounds (e.g., sighing, crying, laughing) and speech. Richman believes that a third type of vocalization lies between them -- singing. "Singing and speech seem very different; ... singing is more expressive of emotions than speech." He further holds that the social functions of singing provide something that speaking does not do. "... group singing gives ... a strong, direct feeling of social cohesion and solidarity." Finally, he proposes that singing "... served as an evolutionary