{"id":44145,"date":"2024-07-01T14:20:42","date_gmt":"2024-07-01T12:20:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/74d37be6-b740-4e57-9d3f-48283b70ec88"},"modified":"2024-07-01T14:36:10","modified_gmt":"2024-07-01T12:36:10","slug":"which-came-first-music-or-language-the-answer-might-intrigue-you","status":"publish","type":"rss_feed","link":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/rss_feed\/which-came-first-music-or-language-the-answer-might-intrigue-you\/","title":{"rendered":"Which came first, music or language? The answer might intrigue you"},"content":{"rendered":"

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By <\/p>

Published: Monday, 01 July 2024 at 12:20 PM<\/p>

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It\u2019s one of the greatest scientific chicken-and-egg questions out there, and there\u2019s no definitive answer in sight: which came first, music or language? <\/strong><\/p>

Was music the primordial sonic soup out of which the infinite variety of human-made languages emerged \u2013 so music wins? Or is language the root of our success as a species, in which case music-making is a subset of linguistic competence, and language is the winner?<\/p>

Will we run out of new music?<\/a><\/strong><\/li><\/ul>
Did the animal kingdom have a part to play?<\/h2>
With these philosophical holy grails at stake, celebrated thinkers have devoted time and energy to these dilemmas. Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Charles Darwin imagined language emerging from the music-like sounds of the animal kingdom, so that our communicative universe came from a pre-linguistic biosphere of music-making. <\/p>
That explains music\u2019s hold over our emotions, independent of its having to mean anything concrete in the world of our ancestors, such as \u2018that tiger\u2019s coming to get you!\u2019 or \u2018the prospect of entering into the transaction of genetic material with you is quite appealing!\u2019<\/p>
Is music mere ‘auditory cheesecake’?<\/h2>
Yet love and fear can be expressed by both mediums. Music-like sounds get to our emotions and prelapsarian instincts faster, whereas language engages our intellects. But for the evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker, music is mere \u2018auditory cheesecake\u2019, an entertaining but evolutionarily useless byproduct of human sensation.<\/p>
Still, it\u2019s that interzone between music and language \u2013 \u2018musilanguage\u2019 as scientists call it \u2013 that\u2019s the most promising area of recent thinking. The anthropologist and archaeologist Steven Mithen further developed the concept in his powerful 2005 book The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind and Body<\/i>. <\/p>
<\/div><\/figure><p>His work shows that hard-and-fast separation is an unhelpful distinction. When we talk, we create emotional expression as well as communicating concepts, and when we sing or play, we can also communicate real-world phenomena through our music-making.<\/p><p>For proof, think of the way that you communicated with the children in your life when they were small, those contours of soothing melodies and speak-singing that are called \u2018infant-directed speech\u2019. It\u2019s a way of communicating that\u2019s both full of meaning \u2013 and full of music. <\/p><script src=\"https:\/\/cdn.jwplayer.com\/players\/xjL98ot4-lqFafnwo.js\"\/><h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"h-musilanguage-the-closest-we-ve-got-to-an-answer\">Musilanguage - the closest we've got to an answer?<\/h2><p>Mithen thinks this is a contender for what a primeval musilanguage in our hominid ancestors might have sounded like. More than that, he proposes that our use of this kind of musilanguage was what bonded us together as ancestral societies, and that it\u2019s through those bonds that our languages, our brains, and ultimately our civilisations evolved. <\/p><p>What came first, music or language? Both \u2013 and neither. Musilanguage is what underlies them, before our brains separated. Let\u2019s put them back together. We\u2019re all musilinguists, and we always have been.<\/p><p> <strong>Illustration by Maria Corte Maidagan<\/strong><\/p> <\/body><\/html>\n<hr class=\"no-tts wp-block-separator\"\/>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>By Published: Monday, 01 July 2024 at 12:20 PM It\u2019s one of the greatest scientific chicken-and-egg questions out there, and there\u2019s no definitive answer in sight: which came first, music or language? Was music the primordial sonic soup out of which the infinite variety of human-made languages emerged \u2013 so music wins? Or is language […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":24,"featured_media":44146,"template":"","categories":[1],"acf":{"readingTimeMinutes":"3"},"uagb_featured_image_src":{"full":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/37\/2024\/07\/which-came-first-music-or-language-the-answer-might-intrigue-you-scaled.jpg",2560,1707,false],"thumbnail":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/37\/2024\/07\/which-came-first-music-or-language-the-answer-might-intrigue-you-150x150.jpg",150,150,true],"medium":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/37\/2024\/07\/which-came-first-music-or-language-the-answer-might-intrigue-you-300x200.jpg",300,200,true],"medium_large":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/37\/2024\/07\/which-came-first-music-or-language-the-answer-might-intrigue-you-768x512.jpg",768,512,true],"large":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/37\/2024\/07\/which-came-first-music-or-language-the-answer-might-intrigue-you-1024x683.jpg",800,534,true],"1536x1536":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/37\/2024\/07\/which-came-first-music-or-language-the-answer-might-intrigue-you-1536x1024.jpg",1536,1024,true],"2048x2048":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/37\/2024\/07\/which-came-first-music-or-language-the-answer-might-intrigue-you-2048x1365.jpg",2048,1365,true]},"uagb_author_info":{"display_name":"importmanagerhub@sprylab.com","author_link":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/author\/importmanagerhubsprylab-com\/"},"uagb_comment_info":0,"uagb_excerpt":"By Published: Monday, 01 July 2024 at 12:20 PM It\u2019s one of the greatest scientific chicken-and-egg questions out there, and there\u2019s no definitive answer in sight: which came first, music or language? Was music the primordial sonic soup out of which the infinite variety of human-made languages emerged \u2013 so music wins? Or is language…","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rss_feed\/44145"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rss_feed"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/rss_feed"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/24"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/44146"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44145"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/bbcmusicmagazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44145"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}