Chapter Seventeen: In Olden Times

 The Law of Pipes

In olden times Huang-ti ordered Ling Lun to establish the lü. Ling Lun travelled from the western to the shady northern side of Mount Yuan Yü. He selected bamboo grown in the Chieh Ch'i valley. He chose only a piece which was hollow and of even thickness. He cut off its knots and used the hollow section between the two joints, the length of which was 3.9 ts'un. And he blew the pipe and produced the sound kung of huang-chung. He then brought twelve other pipes of different lengths down from the mountain and he listened to the sounds of the male and female Phoenix birds. He grouped their sounds into the twelve lü. There were six sounds of the male bird, and another six of the female. He related them to the kung of the huang-chung and found that the huang-chung was the foundation of the lü-lü. [as quoted in "Myth and Reality in the Theory of Chinese Tonal System," by János Kárpáti -- Studia Musicologica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae, T. 22, Fasc. 1/4. (1980), pp. 5-14.

In order to understand the above passage, it is necessary, first of all, to realize that the syllable lü has different meanings, marked by different written characters, depending on the pitch with which it is spoken. Two of these meanings are: “law” and “pipe.” Thus, the well-known Chinese myth of the Yellow Bell (huang-chung) is based on either an amusing pun or a hilarious misunderstanding. The Yellow Emporer, Huang-ti ordered Ling Lun to establish the law but what he actually comes up with is a pipe. Which suggests that the person credited with determining the tunings which were to become the basis of the Chinese tonal system was tone-deaf.

This disconcerting notion is made more probable when we consult another version of the story, as told by the 1^st Century BC historian Ssii-ma Ch'ien:

Starting from the first pipe, the author says, you construct a series of pipes either by "taking away or adding a third" from the pipes that follow. So if the length of the first pipe is 1, the next one is a third shorter, i.e. two-thirds its length, and the following one is a third longer than the previous one, that is 4/3, which will be 8/9 of the first pipe's length. (Ibid. pp. 6-7)

In other words, the tunings determining the lü-lü (literally “pipe-law”) can be constructed purely on the basis of measurement, with no need for any pitch awareness whatsoever. The first five pipes constructed from this method will produce the first five pitches of the “circle of fifths” (e.g., C – G – D – A – E), from which the familiar pentatonic scale can be derived: C-D-E-G-A, or, to use the Chinese terminology: kung, shang, chiao, chih, yü (equivalent to our do, re, me, sol, la).

But there is more. Thanks, possibly, to the aforementioned confusion over the meanings of lü, the Yellow Bell

was conceived simultaneously as a sacred eternal principle, the basis of the state and a note of definite pitch in music. . . It was considered important to find the correct pitch for each dynasty, or political disorder would be likely to ensue. (Peter Crossley-Holland, as quoted in Phillip Tagg, A Short Prehistory of Western Music (rough version 1), p. 15.)

Moreover, possibly because a “law” can also be understood as a “rule,” which can be extended to mean “standard of measurement” (as for example a “ruler”),

The choice of the primary pitch in China had extramusical as well as practical applications, for the length of the yellow bell pipe became the standard measure (like a metre); and the number of grains of rice that would fill it were used for a weight measure. Thus, the pipe itself was often the property not of the Imperial music department but of the office of weights and measurements. (Encyclopedia Britannica website, East Asian Arts.)

And since a “ruler” is not only an implement that measures according to a “rule,” but the one who makes the “rules” (in the sense of “laws”) the Yellow Bell took on central importance in Chinese civilization, putting music “in tune with the universe.” 

"Music is the harmony of heaven and earth while rites are the measurement of heaven and earth. Through harmony all things are made known, through measure all things are properly classified. Music comes from heaven, rites are shaped by earthly designs." (Ibid.)

[T]he five fundamental tones are sometimes connected with the five directions or the five elements, while the 12 tones are connected by some writers with the months of the year, hours of the day, or phases of the moon. The 12 tones also can be found placed in two sets of 6 on Imperial panpipes (pai-hsiao) in keeping with the female-male (yin-yang) principle of Chinese metaphysics. (Ibid.)

Origins

There are several things that interest me in this remarkable myth. First, it presents us with a fascinating theory about the origin of the panpipe, an instrument to which I’ve attached considerable importance (see, especially, Chapter Nine), and, by extension, the origins of music itself, one of the principle themes of this book. And not only the origins of music in general, but the origin of the musical notes, and the system by which they are tuned. 

Significantly, it associates pipes and/or panpipes with birds (see Chapter Twelve). This is something one finds very often in the literature on panpipes, from many different regions all over the world. And indeed some of the oldest pipes described in the archaeological literature were made from bird bones. 

Especially significant are the references to pipes as either male or female. Indeed the story of the Yellow Bell appears to be the source of the fundamental Chinese concept of Yin and Yang. In a great many pipe, flute and panpipe traditions, almost everywhere these instruments are found, from Africa to China, southeast Asia, Melanesia and even the Americas, the division into male and female is important.

And since the story of the Yellow Bell centers on ratios, then perhaps we can think of it also as the story of the origin of mathematics. In fact there are some remarkable similarities between the theory behind the Chinese tuning system and the Pythagorean system of the ancient Greeks. But aren’t all panpipes based on mathematical ratios? In the words of sociologist Marcell Mauss, “a theory of music exists everywhere there are panpipes” (as quoted in Hugo Zemp, "Aspects of 'Are'are Musical Theory" (Ethnomusicology vol. 23, no. 1, 1979)).

Another thing I've noticed in the Chinese accounts is that they are not only about origins but also traditions, and the way traditions are maintained. The Yellow Bell becomes the standard for a great many things that were vital to traditional Chinese society. It began, however, as a wooden pipe and, as such, would tend to expand or contract over time. It was necessary, therefore, for the original process of its creation to be repeated at various times – traditionally at the accession of a new emperor. 

One could see this custom as an insight into the nature of tradition, too often misunderstood as the rather boring insistence on continually doing things the same old way. However, as the myth of the Yellow Bell suggests, in order for traditions to continue functioning as such, they must not only be maintained, but renewed (see Sidebar One). 


And speaking of origins, my favorite part of this story has to do with the possibility that the whole thing could have begun with a complete misunderstanding. I could be way off base here, and if I'm wrong I hope someone with a knowledge of ancient Chinese will step in to correct me. But if our hero Ling Lun actually was tone deaf, and as a result, actually did misunderstand an order to produce a system of "laws" as an order to produce an arrangement of "pipes," then this too could give us an insight into the meaning of many other venerable and venerated, but also rather strange and inexplicable traditions, which might well have originated in misunderstandings, deceptions, accidents, or other events of a more or less trivial nature.

A Myth is a Lie . . .

I will now proceed to weave a myth of my own, compounded from the Yellow Bell myth interwoven with some of the various yarns I’ve been spinning throughout the course of this book. Before I continue, however, I want to quote one of my all time favorite sayings, attributed to one of my all time favorite artists, Pablo Picasso: “Art is a lie that makes you see the truth.” That for me is a truly profound observation, with enormous resonance in all possible directions. I think the same can be said for myth -- so I'll say it: A myth is a lie that makes you see the truth.

In that spirit, I'll ask some questions that I, for one, find especially intriguing about this particular myth: who was the Yellow Emperor? where did he live? when did he live? what was the Yellow Bell? where was it first created? when was it first created? The assumption behind literally all interpretations of this story is that it takes place at some indefinitely defined "olden time," possibly 2 or 3 hundred, or two or three thousand, years BC, somewhere in China.

To better evaluate that assumption, let's examine a more recent myth about the origin of panpipes, from the United States:

A story handed down by ex-slaves claims that one evening a slave was feeling low in spirit and heard a plaintive cry of a night bird. The sound inspired the slave to get a piece of cane from a canebrake and cut some holes in it. He then commenced to play a “blues” on his whistle. As time went by, the instrument evolved into a set of “quills.” (The Birds and the Blues, by Max Haymes.)

According to this myth, the panpipe, or as it was sometimes called by African-American bluesmen, the "quills," originated in the United States. We know that can't be true, however, because of overwhelming evidence that this instrument antedates the founding of the United States and, indeed, the discovery of the Americas. So the person inspired by the bird could not have been an African-American slave, as the story implies, but someone who lived at a time far more remote than either slavery or America itself.

I believe the same critical thought process must be applied to the myth of the Yellow Emperor and the Yellow Bell. If we are to seek the truth pointed to by the myth, we must both take it seriously and treat it skeptically, tease out the "lie" behind it so we can see the truth toward which it is pointing.


All the evidence tells us the Yellow Emperor could not have been Chinese and the Yellow Bell could not have originated in China.

True Lies

According to musicologist Fritz Kuttner, the original set of wooden pipes could not have consisted of more than five. The complete set of 12 tones mentioned in the version I cited above seem to have been a much later development. Based on his systematic analysis of the terminology associated with each of the 12 tones, Kuttner concludes that the original set of five pipes could only have been produced prior to the era when tuned bells were being cast. And "Since tuned bells dating from the early Shang II period have been found in quantity, the first partial Lü system [i.e., the original five tone scale] might easily go back to Shang I times."

So far this sounds like pretty ordinary, academic stuff, but Kuttner finds his conclusion "almost shocking, because it pushes the beginnings of the traditional Chinese tone system back into pre-historic times in the direction of the legendary dynastic dates which every serious student of China's history would dismiss as naive. It seems that here we have a musicological tiger by the tail because our conclusion must be unacceptable to orthodox sinology.” (“A Musicological Interpretation of the Twelve Lüs in China's Traditional Tone System,” in Ethnomusicology, Vol. 9, No. 1. (Jan., 1965), pp. 22-38.)

Since I'll be weaving a myth of my own, it won't be necessary to examine Kuttner's reasoning too carefully. Even if it contains a flaw, it nevertheless expresses, as I see it, the simple truth hidden behind an elaborate facade. Because pipes and panpipes are found in many different parts of the world, often among indigenous peoples living in remote areas far from any possible Chinese influence.

In fact, as we learned in Chapter Seven, the distribution of these instruments can best be explained on the basis of a common cultural ancestry, dating from a period well before the origin of any of the Chinese dynasties; dating, in all likelihood to the “Out of Africa” migration itself, anywhere from 60,000 to 90,000 years ago. Assuming this musical tradition did in fact have a beginning, which would be pretty difficult to deny, it was certainly not in China.

According to my myth, the “Yellow Emporer” would have been African, possibly an early ancestor of the Bushmen, who are often described as having yellowish complexions (to go with the epicanthic folds in their eyelids). In certain documents he's described as the ancestor of all the Chinese people, but since in my version he's African, maybe he was everyone's ancestor, the first culturally "modern" human. His assistant, the creator of the Yellow Bell, must also have been African -- though he might not have even been a single person, but possibly a group, all working and thinking together. He might not even have been a he, but a she.

Sinologists will no doubt protest, as Kuttner anticipated they would. But on what grounds? If the Yellow Emperor and the Yellow Bell both date back to some mythical, undocumented, past, then who's to say where -- or when -- they originated? And if anyone wants to claim the originator of the myth clearly intended it to be about China and nowhere else, then we're back where we started, with more speculation about origins -- this time the origin of the myth itself. And who's to say where that got started -- and by whom? As I see it, therefore, my version is at least as good as anyone else's. Better in fact, because, as should be clear from everything you’ve read up to now, it is backed up by evidence.

Sets of pipes are, indeed, an important part of the history of Chinese music, Chinese music theory and even Chinese philosophy. They go back a long way into Chinese pre-history, to at least 1100 BC, the estimated date of a set of bird bone instruments found in a tomb in Henan Province. But as the genetic evidence so strongly suggests, the Chinese themselves did not originate in China, but, ultimately, along with everyone else: Africa.

And, as we work our way backward in time from the earliest migration to East Asia by "modern" humans, I see no reason to assume such pipes could have been “independently invented” in that region, especially since they are now so common, not only in Africa, but so many other places along the original migration path, complete with bird associations, male-female pairing, hocketed ensemble performance, and in so many (though not all) cases, pentatonic tunings. Thus, according to my myth, the Yellow Bell was an African instrument, and the first tuned pipes an African invention.

But why, you ask, is this matter so important? Because, as I see it, the myth of the Yellow Bell is not only about the creation of a set of tuned pipes, but the first tonal system, thus the origin of music itself – and not only music, but also language; and not only language, but . . .

The Centrality of Pitch

In almost all speculations regarding early music and its origins, the most essential element, the use of discrete pitches, and their organization into a coherent tonal system, is either ignored or taken for granted – i.e., assumed a priori with no need to explain how it evolved. Yet if there is any one element of music that clearly distinguishes it from any other type of activity, by any other creature, it is pitch.

In the previous chapter, I discussed the manner in which certain apes and gibbons perform coordinated “duets” and/or “choruses,” which, as I speculated, could represent a “missing link” between the hooted vocalizations of primates, which do not employ discrete pitches, and the yodeled vocalizations so commonly found among Pygmies and Bushmen, which do. While duetting and chorusing are, indeed, very close to “Shouted Hocket,” as widely performed among many indigenous peoples worldwide, neither hooting nor shouting, no matter how highly coordinated, can, strictly speaking, be regarded as music. To clarify, let’s compare an example of shouted hocket with a similarly interactive performance characterized by yodeling. (See Chapter Sixteen for references.)

Shouted hocket: an “esime,” or “interlude” between songs, as performed by a group of Aka Pygmies: Audio Example 56: Aka esime

Yodeled hocket: performed by a group of Huli tribesmen, from highland New Guinea: Audio Example 54:  Huli Yodeling

In the first example, I hear only unpitched shouting, while in the second I hear two distinct pitches: A# and F#. And the question is: how did we bridge the gap between the first type of vocalization and the second? And why should the difference matter? Before we can meaningfully speculate on such matters, we need to ask ourselves a more basic question: what is a musical tone?

Phonemes and Tonemes

What might seem on the surface to be a simple step, from ordinary vocalizing (as in hoots or shouts) to the singing (or playing) of discrete pitches, is in fact an enormous leap, with profound consequences for human culture and history. What we have been conditioned to hear when we sing, or play an instrument, is very different from the purely acoustical phenomena produced, as displayed on an oscilloscope or sonogram.

For one thing, the “tones” of music are not individual tones at all, but complexes of sound, with many elements, beginning with a set of overtones, combined with certain resonances, instabilities, possibly some degree of nasality, harshness, breathiness, raspiness, etc. What we think we perceive, is, in other words, very much a social construct rather than a given. This is a situation closely analogous with what happens when we hear a spoken syllable, which, for linguists, can be understood either phonetically or phonemically.

The phonetic is what we actually hear acoustically, much of which usually escapes our conscious awareness. The phonemic refers to what we hear psychologically, based on certain fundamental sets of culturally determined oppositions, or "articulations," put into play by each individual language.

More generally, anthropologists often use the term emic (derived from “phonemic”) with reference to the culturally determined aspect of any behavior or belief, and etic (derived from “phonetic”) with reference to descriptions of a more objective nature.

There is no generally accepted equivalent terminology for music but there ought to be, because there is a strong analogy at work between what happens when we perceive musical notes as "tonemes" (to use the relatively obscure, but apt, expression coined by musicologist Charles Seeger) and when we perceive spoken vocables as "phonemes." This is not a coincidence, but an important clue to the nature of both music and language -- and the relation of one to the other.

Ferdinand de Saussure, the father of “structural linguistics” and semiology, argued convincingly that language must be understood as “a system of interdependent terms in which the value of each term results solely from the simultaneous presence of the others” (de Saussure 1922:159). The deep relevance of this statement to the realm of music as well has often been overlooked. The key term is “value”—as in the tonal and rhythmic “values” of Western notation. The values of which de Saussure writes can thus be applied not only to the structure of phonemes (understood as classes of vocables) but to musical notes as well, understood “tonemically” as pitch classes, both of which are produced from field-like systems of class “identity” built on culturally sanctioned (“emic”) distinctions.

“In Olden Times”

How does this relate to the Yellow Bell? Let’s recall the myth: “In olden times,” Ling Lun “selected bamboo grown in the Chieh Ch'i valley. He chose only a piece which was hollow and of even thickness.” But that was only the first step. He then proceeded to construct a set of pipes by adding or subtracting a third of the original’s length, thus producing a system through which the pitches of all tones are related to one another according to simple ratios defined by the smallest whole numbers, specifically the powers of 2 and 3.

In other words, he starts with a pipe that produces a discretely defined pitch, but that is not enough. In order for the pitch to be heard meaningfully, it must be part of “a system of interdependent terms in which the value of each term results solely from the simultaneous presence of the others” (see above). In other words, in order to be heard culturally, as a musical “phoneme,” rather than simply acoustically, as either “pure sound” or “noise,” it is necessary for an individual pitch to be part of a rational tonal system. Thus, a culturally determined system of tuned pipes is already the basis for what can only be called a “language,” musical or otherwise, precisely in the sense defined by Saussure.

There’s more: once you have a situation where different “tonemes” are produced by different pipes in a rationally related set, then, as with the phonemes of spoken language, each pipe has the potential to become a signifier – if for nothing else then, at the very least, the tone it will produce when played. Thus, to “notate” a melody you could line the pipes up in order of size and then point to one pipe at a time, in the same sequence as the notes of the melody you have in mind.¹ It is then only one small step to the understanding of each tone as a signifier for anything one might want to point to while playing or singing. Which puts us well on the road to a language or, if you prefer, proto-language, consisting exclusively of tonal relationships -- consistent, perhaps, with what Steven Brown has called “musilanguage” (The Musilanguage Model of Musical Evolution, in Wallin, Merker & Brown, eds., The Origins of Music. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000, pp. 271-300), in which

the many structural features shared between music and language are the result of their emergence from a joint evolutionary precursor rather than from fortuitous parallelism or from one function begetting the other. (p. 271)

Bridging the Gaps

We are now better prepared to return to the question posed above: how did we bridge the gap between simple primate vocalizations and the singing (or playing) of systematically organized musical pitches? To which we will now want to add a second question: given a system of meaningfully organized pitches, or what we might want to call, in Brown’s terms, a “musilanguage,” how did we arrive at both music and language as we now know them?

There is probably no way to answer such questions definitively, as there is far too much information we don’t have, and will in all likelihood, never have. But I do think we are now, after so many preliminaries, in a good position to speculate intelligently on such matters, and in that spirit I will offer the following sequence as a hypothesis worth considering:

1.      Interactive "hooted" vocalizations of early primates and pre-humans, along the lines of the "duetting" and "chorusing" of certain contemporary ape and gibbon populations. The adaptational advantage of such behavior was most likely the facilitation of both long distance communication and close cooperation.
 

2.      The morphing of pre-human "hooting" into more or less discretely pitched yodeling could have been an adaptation associated with the transition from a largely vegetarian to a largely carnivorous diet. Since many birds sing using roughly discrete pitches, there would have been an advantage for human hunters in learning how to imitate bird songs as a lure, and yodeling, closely related to hooting, may have been the simplest means of doing that.

3.      At some point someone would have discovered that one could do an excellent bird call imitation by blowing into a hollow pipe. Since some of the oldest pipes found in archaeological digs are made from bird bones, this might also have involved a form of imitative magic.

4.      There is no way of knowing which of the two previous steps would have come first. Perhaps yodeling and piping developed in tandem, as suggested by the following examples of vocal-instrumental hocket (as first presented in Chapter Nine): Audio Example 19: Voice with Hindewhu, BaBenzele Pygmies; Audio Example 20: Hocket with Voice and Pipe, Huli people, highland New Guinea.

5.      More or less isolated pitches produced by either yodels or pipes may have made useful lures, but would still have been a far cry from what we now consider music. They would, no doubt, have been heard simply in terms of how far or close they came to the call of a particular bird. Thus, in order for music to come into existence, there must, at a certain very specific point in human history, have come an extraordinary moment of discovery, every bit as important, in my view, as the invention of the wheel. This is the moment described in the myth of the Yellow Bell, the moment when someone selects a length of cane to make a pipe in the usual way, but then gets the idea of creating a set of pipes, organized according to a system.

     It’s important to understand that only through the creation of a set of systematically organized, tangible artifacts could truly musical “tonemes,” as opposed to animal imitations or simple utterances, have come into existence. Regardless of its purely acoustic status, a single tone can never be a toneme. Nor would a set of vocalized pitches have had, at such an early stage, the stability to establish a system of interrelated values, as understood by de Saussure, over time. And since, as we know, almost every human society in the world sings and plays using tonal systems based on ratios very close to the integer ratios associated with the Yellow Bell story, the founding set of pipes would have to have been organized according to more or less the same simple ratios.

6.      On the basis of the above sequence, it's not difficult to see how the development of a system of rationally related pitch “classes” or “tonemes” could have led to the development of a language of sorts, based exclusively on tonal relations. Once such a system of tuned pipes is established, we already have, as I argued above, both a “phonemic” and a “semantic” system as well. Each individual tone will now be heard "tonemically," in terms of the tonal structure embodied in the entire set, and will at the same time be in a position to function as a signifier of, at the very least, the note it produces. Could this have been how speech emerged, as a language of pure tones?

7.      If the earliest "language" consisted essentially of discrete pitches, then we can see how, for early humans, the development of musical awareness, as part and parcel of linguistic awareness, would have had a powerful adaptational advantage (now lost, of course, since music no longer has the same function).

8.      At a certain point this proto-language or “musilanguage” would have diverged into two independent branches -- one leading directly to purely musical interactions something like these: Audio Example 13:Mbuti Pipers (African Pygmies); Audio Example 21: Ede Panpipes (Vietnamese “Montagnards”) (see Chapter Nine for references); Audio Example 84: Chek I Vendelar (the Ouldeme of Cameroon, in Flutes of the Mandara Mountains); Audio Example 85: Kiloloky (the Mikea of Madagascar, from Pays Mikea, Ocora Records); Audio Example 63: Panpipes of Buma (the Buma people, of the Solomon Islands, from Spirit of Melanesia) -- the other leading directly to the development of tone language, as the use of tonal phonemes would have persisted even after non-tonal elements were added. As Steven Brown reminds us, the close association between the two realms can still be heard in the drum and whistle languages of today.²

In sum, the events alluded to in the Yellow Bell myth go well beyond the spatial and temporal borders of ancient China to a foundational moment in “deep history,” a crucial first step in a refining process destined to take us from the raw acoustics of the etic to the first stages of an emic awareness that would ultimately give rise not only to music and language, but so many other aspects of culture, from religion, social organization, kinship, mathematics, astronomy, philosophy etc. to the science and technology of our modern world.

---

1. One could object that true music notation is permanent, whereas the process I just described is ephemeral and requires memorization. That would be true for the notation of a melody, yes. But each set of pipes can also be regarded as the notation of both a scale and a tuning system. And as such it would have some permanence, at least as much as an inscription on parchment or paper. Moreover, if the original pipes are then used as templates for the production of new pipes, we have a very durable system indeed. As with the digital encoding systems of today, what is “handed down” is not only an original “artifact,” but the process through which the artifact can be continually reconstructed -- and the tradition embodied by it renewed.

2. There is, of course, a great deal more to be said about such possibilities. While I’m not at all sure Dr. Brown would agree with everything (or anything) I’ve written here, I would recommend his essay as a thorough treatment of some of the more subtle and complex aspects of the “musilanguage” hypothesis.

Chapter Sixteen: Missing Links

In Chapter Four, I described my “baseline” (HBC) as a kind of observatory from which all subsequent societies could be viewed; and in the following chapters I demonstrated how it could be put to use for that purpose. In this chapter, I'll swing the “telescope” around by 180 degrees for a peek in the opposite direction. Instead of looking forward toward what, for our ancestors, would have been the future, I’ll be looking backward toward their past.

It’s important to remember that our Most Recent Common Ancestors (MRCA) were not all that special in themselves, but simply, and due largely to chance, the group from which the ancestors of today’s Pygmies and Bushmen diverged, roughly 60,000 to possibly well over 100,000 years ago. From this very broad perspective, it should be clear that the ancestral culture I’ve been treating as originary is itself the product of historical and evolutionary forces that preceded it, leading all the way back to the first “modern” humans, the earliest archaic humans, and beyond, to the ancestors we have in common with our closest primate relatives.

Is there any evidence that might link the already advanced culture of HBC with that of these much earlier, and decidedly more primitive, societies? Would it surprise you if I answered “yes”? At this point, I suppose not. And would it surprise you if I were to once again claim that the most promising evidence lies within the realm of music? I could be wrong, but as I see it the musical evidence contains some tantalizing clues that I can’t resist exploring.

Out on a Limb

What sort of music might have existed before the already highly developed musical language I’ve posited for our most recent common ancestors? In other words, what could have happened in the many thousands, indeed millions, of years leading up to the development of P/B? Since this style is already so complex and sophisticated, it’s difficult to imagine how it could have been created out of whole cloth. Something much simpler must have preceded it. And here I’ll be literally going out on a limb, to consider the vocal behavior of our cousins, the apes.

In the fascinating book, The Origins of Music, neuroscientist Björn Merker specifically relates the vocalizations of certain primates to the early development of human music:

Synchronous calling . . ., that is, true cooperative synchronous calling rather than synchrony as a default condition of competitive signaling, requires a motivational mechanism for mutual entrainment. We assume that such a mechanism was selected for in the course of hominid divergence from our common ancestor with the chimpanzee, and was retained to the present day in the form of our propensity to join in and entrain to a repetitive beat. . . Indeed, if the present argument should turn out to have any merit, this adaptation for entrainment supplies an irreducible biological root of human music.
 

While, according to Merker, true synchrony is absent among chimpanzees, it can apparently be found in bonobos. Referring to a study of bonobo vocalizations by the noted primatologist, Franz de Waal, Merker points to “a loud and explosive sound called staccato hooting.” According to de Waal, “during choruses, staccato hooting of different individuals is almost perfectly synchronized so that one individual acts as the ‘echo’ of another, or emits calls at the same moments as another. The calls are given in a steady rhythm of about two per second.” (from Björn Merker, “Synchronous Chorusing and Human Origins,” in Wallin, Merker & Brown, The Origins of Music. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000, pp. 318-319).¹ 

Research by Gottfried Hohmann and Barbara Fruth, who studied Bonobos in the wild, in the Lomako Forest of Central Zaire, is consistent with de Waal's observations:

From analyses of simultaneous high- hootings of mature pairs, it became apparent that calls of both apes were given often in more or less perfect alternation, indicating a remarkable degree of behavioral coordination between them. Jordan (1977) and de Waal (1988) mention a high degree of synchronization between vocalizations of different individuals, and the latter author emphasized the gibbon-like nature of long-distance hooting. (Structure and Use of Distance Calls in Wild Bonobos, 1994).

In a fascinating paper by Ellen Dissanayake, entitled If music is the food of love, what about survival and reproductive success?, the author makes much of certain musical features of human mother-infant interactions. Significantly, she points to "interactive behaviors" between mother and child that

take place . . . sequentially, in bouts of 1.5 to 3 seconds, on a time base, so that each partner in the dyad reacts and responds contingently to the other’s signals within one-half second or less, anticipating and participating in an ongoing, changing, cocreated engagement. I propose that the dyadic coordination developed in mother infant interaction is likely a precursor of human music in which individuals mutually coordinate their voices and body movement in temporally and dynamically structured sequences (my emphasis, p. 177).

Since, according to de Waal, a very similar type of interaction, at essentially the same pace (2 per second), is characteristic of bonobos, Dissanayake's observations seem consistent with the notion of a possible link between human and bonobo vocalizations, reflected in the structure of the mother-infant bond.

Synchronous Calling – Some Examples

On Franz de Waal’s website, based on his book, Our Inner Ape, we find an audio clip where the “chorusings” of multiple bonobos and chimpanzees are compared: Audio Example 76:Bonobos and Chimps. In both cases we hear highly interactive calls; and the bonobo interactions do, as predicted, seem somewhat more precisely timed than those of the chimps.

As indicated by de Waal, as referenced above, the “long-distance hooting” of bonobos resembles that of certain gibbons, and fortunately there are some excellent videos of gibbons interacting vocally. Here is a very interesting youtube video featuring a common type of not- so-distant “duetting” between a pair of Siamang Gibbons. Video Example Nine:Siamang Gibbon Calls 

Here's another example, also Siamangs: Video Example 10:Siamang Singing.

Shouted Hocket

While not as precisely synchronized as a well rehearsed musical performance, these highly interactive duets are good examples of the “synchronous calling” invoked by Merker and de Waal. In addition to Merker's insightful speculations, what interests me especially about this sort of behavior is its strong resemblance to a highly distinctive form of human vocal interaction I've called “Shouted Hocket.” (Definitions of the term “hocket” can be found in Chapter One and Appendix A. Shouted Hocket is an extreme simplification of essentially the same principle, based on the rapid interlocking and/or interchange of shouted, hooted or yodeled tones.) To better understand the connection, let’s examine a copy of the phylogenetic map presented in Appendix B (click on image to enlarge):

Figure 16.1 Phylogenetic Map of Musical Evolution. For details on how it was constructed and how to interpret it, see Appendix B.

The tree is rooted at the lower left with a musical “haplotype” labeled “X - Primate Duetting/Chorusing.” X is characterized by four markers: Hk for “hocket,” CV for “continuous vocalizing,” It for “iterative” vocalizing, and Ht for “hooting,” a type of vocalization closely related to yodel. Just above and to the right, we find “A1- Shouted Hocket,” a form of “synchronized calling,” very similar to that of bonobos and gibbons, only performed by humans. A1, also characterized by hocket, continuous vocalizing and iteration, is remarkably close to X.

Let’s listen to some audio clips of Shouted Hocket from various parts of the world, keeping in mind the bonobo, chimp and siamang examples we’ve just heard. Before continuing, however, I want to make clear that it is not my intention to equate the music of any of these people with the calls of apes or gibbons. Most of their music is in fact far more complex and sophisticated than the brief excerpts I'm quoting here.

We’ve already heard some examples of simple two part interactions in Chapter Fourteen:

From the Huli people, Southern Highlands of New Guinea: Audio Example 54:  Huli Yodeling (from Emap FM – Music from Oceania ).

From the Dani, also a highland New Guinea group: Audio Example 55: Dani (from Emap FM – Music from Oceania).

An “esime” (shouted interlude between more elaborate songs), from the Aka Pygmies of Africa: Audio Example 56: Aka esime (from Musical Anthology of the Aka Pygmies, recorded by Simha Arom).

Here’s a more complex example of Shouted Hocket from Brazil. Audio Example 77:Mehinacu. Listen especially to the closely interactive hocketing at the very end of the clip, reminiscent of the bonobo and chimpanzee chorusing heard in Audio Example 76 (From Saydisc, Disappearing World.)

Here’s an example of beautifully yodeled “duetting” from the Island of Madagascar, where the Mikea hunter/gatherers have traditionally been considered the indigenous inhabitants. Audio Example 78:Mikea (From the Ocora CD, Madagascar, Pays Mikea.)

An especially interesting and intricate hocketed vocal interchange, sometimes called “throat singing” can be found among many Siberian groups, where it is associated with shamanic traditions, and also among the Inuit (Eskimos), where it is currently regarded as a game.

From Kamchatka, in Siberia: Audio Example 79:Kamchatka

From the Inuit: Video Example 11:Eskimo Inuit Throat Singing.

Compare with this shamanic ritual from the Ainu indigenes of Japan: Audio Example 80:Ainu. Something similar, but thousands of miles away, from the Hupa, a native American tribe of Northern California: Audio Example 81:Hupa (from Lee Productions).

Halfway between A1, Shouted Hocket, and A2, Interlocked Hocket, we find more complexly interactive vocalizations, close in some ways to the chorusing of both bonobos and chimps, as heard above, but more precisely synchronized. Listen, for example, to this excerpt from an extended initiation ritual among the Ju’hoansi Bushmen:  Audio Example 82:Tcoqma (from Namibia:Chants des Bushmen Ju’hoansi, recorded by Emmanuelle Olivier). To my ears there are some truly remarkable similarities between this African ritual and the now familiar “Monkey Chant” of Bali: Audio Example 83:Ketjak (from Golden Rain, recorded by David Lewiston).

A Musical Link

Can we understand Shouted Hocket (which includes not only unpitched shouting, but also pitched hooted and yodeled “shouts” as well) as a kind of “missing link” between pre-homosapien vocalizing, represented by the duetting and chorusing of bonobos, chimps and gibbons, and our musical "haplogroups," A2, A3, and A4, characterized by more complexly interwoven parts, in counterpoint and/or canon? In other words, was there, at some time deep into the African “Stone Age,” some sort of evolution from something resembling the coordinated vocalizing of today's primates to the far more sophisticated and intricate, but still highly interactive, musical “language” of P/B?

As described by Michelle Kisliuk (see above), the Pygmy “Esime” is a shouted or hooted interlude of the sort often found between more complexly organized interlocked songs. Could it be a survival of an original, unpitched, pre-musical type of vocal interchange? The example we’ve heard from the Dani people of  New Guinea combines a very rhythmic shouted interchange with some softer yodeling heard in the background. The Huli example is very similar but this time clearly yodeled and also pitched, alternating tones a major third apart.

The Mehinacu example is shouted, but the Mikea example that follows is both yodeled and pitched. The example of “throat singing” from Kamchatka is clearly pitched, on three different tones, but the Inuit example is all on one note, more closely resembling primate duetting. Note also the audible breathing in these examples, suggesting hyperventilation (see below).

Both the Ainu and Hupa songs involve both singing and shouted hocket, both with heavy breathing and suggestions of hyperventilation as well. Hyperventilation is clearly present in the Bushmen Tcoqma initiation ceremony, where it is associated with shamanism and trance. The Balinese Ketchak, or “Monkey Chant” is most astonishing of all. Though today it is performed largely for tourists, it is thought to have originated in shamanic trance practices that predate Hinduism.

Shamanic Links

The question now is: what can we make of all these examples? Are there other aspects of any or all of these performances that could give us some clue to their meaning, cultural, historical or both? An especially promising clue is provided by the pioneering research of semiologist Jean-Jacques Nattiez, as described in a remarkable essay, "Inuit Throat-Games and Siberian Throat Singing: A Comparative, Historical, and Semiological Approach" (Ethnomusicology 43, 3, 1999). Having studied examples of throat singing from certain Siberian tribes, the Ainu of the Sakhalin Peninsula and Hokkiado, and various Inuit groups of Alaska and Northern Canada, Nattiez notes that there is a significant difference in meaning between the various Inuit traditions, understood simply as games, and the traditions of the Siberians and Ainu, where throat singing has strong associations with shamanism.

Understood strictly "in context," one might dismiss the very strong stylistic resemblances among all these different practices as of no importance since one functions merely as a game while the others have a very different function, as part of shamanic rituals. Digging deeper, Nattiez brackets the issue of function to consider more generally applicable explanations for all the many similarities, along three categories: "universalist," "diffusionist," and "phylogenetic." Rejecting the first as unlikely and the second as improbable (because the vast geographic distances all but rule out direct influence), he embraces a phylogenetic interpretation:

Among the Inuit and the people of Asia, analogies of distribution between linguistic features . . ., archaeological artefacts . . . and genetic data . . . have been established. This strongly suggests that these connections are the result of a migration which occurred 4,000 to 5,000 years ago . . . (pp. 411-412)

He concludes that what is true for the linguistic, archaeological and genetic connections is probably true for the musical practices, especially in the light of the long series of stylistic similarities he then enumerates. They must all stem from "common protoforms, as is the case for genes and languages..." (p. 413)

Nattiez goes on to consider

why these symbolic forms do not necessarily have these religious connotations today, particularly among the Canadian Inuit. The semiological distinction between the signifier and the signified in an historical perspective will help us to understand how a similar form (a similar signifier) gets a new meaning (a new signified) in a different culture... From this situation, we may draw broader conclusions of interest for general musicology and semiology. In sonorous symbolic forms, the form, the signifier, best resists transformations through time. However, the signified, the religious significations of the animal and nature imitations associated with these forms, are evanescent. (p. 414)

This conclusion is extraordinary, literally turning on its head the long cherished assumption that the only meanings to be seriously considered are those signified in the context of a particular society, meanings which, for Nattiez, must be considered "evanescent." As his research clearly demonstrates, it is the musical signifier that has the power to persist through the ages, from one social context to the next, thus offering the more reliable index of human history and, potentially, the more convincing and satisfying insight into the meaning of music in the broadest and deepest sense.

While Nattiez explodes the hegemony of the functionalist and contextualist assumptions so dear to so many anthropologists and ethnomusicologists, he clearly could not have arrived at the conclusions he did without a very deep prior investigation into the functions and immediate contexts of throat-singing as manifested in all the different cultures studied. In fact, it was the testimony of an Inuit woman, who recalled some things her grandmother had said about the association of Inuit throat "games" with hunting magic, that provided him with an important clue to the origin of such games in shamanistic practice (p. 405).

Significantly, the Balinese “Monkey Chant” is also thought to have originally been part of a shamanic ritual. The Ju'hoansi Tcoqma is unquestionably shamanic, associated with an all night initiation ceremony for young boys, in which many men go into trance and perform healing rituals. Among the Ju'hoansi, the great majority of males are considered shamans, with potentially very powerful healing powers.

A Circumpolar “Proto-form”

As Nattiez demonstrates, the circumpolar “throat-singing” tradition he's identified can be understood as a unified style family despite its being interpreted differently in different social contexts, as either a shamanic practice or a game. It's important to understand that Nattiez achieves his results phylogenetically, by working his way backward, with the aid of archaeological, linguistic and genetic evidence, to a “protoform” for all manifestations of this style, a common root dating to thousands of years in the past. Is it possible for us to connect all or at least some of the other types of “shouted hocket” we've been considering, from Melanesia, Indonesia, South America, Africa, etc., via the same protoform? And if so, would the association with shamanism still be relevant?

As should be clear by now, a significant amount of additional research into both the musical practices and cultural background of all the groups we're considering would be necessary before any solid conclusions could be drawn. Nevertheless, there is a great deal we are in a position to consider at this point, if only provisionally. If all these instances could indeed, in one way or another, turn out to be associated with shamanism, that would certainly strengthen the connection. But as Nattiez has shown, it's not necessary for the social function, the signified, to remain the same, since the same signifier may, over time, come to take on different significations.

What's most important is the ability to trace the various manifestations of the signifier we are examining back to a single source phylogenetically. The presence of shamanism in certain contexts might indeed provide an important clue, but, as Nattiez has taught us, the absence of any particular signified should not necessarily impinge on an investigation of the underlying signifier.

The protoform under consideration here must be understood not simply as a theoretical construct but a real musical style, practiced by real people at a certain time and place, i.e., both historically and geographically. Taking historical linguistics as his guide, Nattiez associates the throat-singing protoform with the time when three language families, Eskimo-Aleut, Chuckchi-Kamchatkan and Altaic were, according to certain linguistic theories, one and the same -- a connection reinforced by evidence from the then nascent field of population genetics. (I'm delighted to note, by the way, that Nattiez has preceded me, not only by taking the genetic evidence into account, but also by suggesting that the musical evidence might actually have a bearing on the way the supposedly “more scientific” linguistic and genetic theories are evaluated.)

Whereas Nattiez was guided by the linguistic and genetic evidence current at that time, pointing to a circumpolar root culture 4,000 or 5,000 years old, we are in a position to take an even broader view, on the basis of the more recently developed, far more extensive, “Out of Africa” theory, with characteristic time spans ranging into the tens of thousands of years. Such research provides us with a “standard candle” based on estimates of anywhere from roughly 60,000 to over 100,000 years for the branching of proto-Pygmies and proto-Bushmen from MRCA. As I've already argued, the extraordinary similarities between the musical traditions of the Pygmies and Bushmen, combined with the genetic results, warrant a complete rethinking of our sense of how long a particular tradition may persist unchanged.

Hyperventilation
 

There is no reason to assume, therefore, that Nattiez’s protoform is only 4 or 5 thousand years old, simply because the divergence of certain language families might date to that time. If the throat-singing complex is, as I suspect, a variant of the far more widely distributed A1 “haplogroup” I’ve labeled “Shouted Hocket,” the protoform might well be truly archaic, traceable not only to HBC but far beyond, to some of the deepest mysteries of our distant past.

According to Nattiez, a pervasive characteristic of throat-singing is the production of a continual stream of sound through rapid alternations of audible exhaling and inhaling, “which create what can be called a 'panting style' . . . the main feature common to the three cultures under consideration” (p. 401). In a remarkable essay, Can Hyperventilation be a trance mechanism in Nganasan ritual dance accompaniment, Triinu Ojamaa and Jaak Aru demonstrate the relation between “panting style,” hyperventilation and trance in the Nganasan Bear Dance, yet another example of the shamanic circumpolar tradition explored by Nattiez. According to the authors, “Inspiration and expiration alternate in a certain rhythm. We can characterize the accompaniment as rhythmically organized panting.” Their essay presents convincing evidence, both musical and biological, of the relationship between hyperventilation and trance, a pervasive feature of shamanism.

Clear signs of hyperventilation can be found in our examples from Kamchatka, the Inuit, Ainu, Hupa, and Ju'hoansi, while there are strong indications of something similar going on in the uncannily rapid, trance inducing, vocal interlock of the Balinese “Monkey Chant.” There are in fact many other instances in many parts of the world where vocalizing combines shouted hocket with gutteral “panting,” hyperventilation and trance, though not always associated with shamanism per se.

A remarkable variant can be found, for example, among Masai warriors, who chant, according to Malcom Floyd, in “a semi-vocalised, semi-pitched, rhythmic hyperventilation accompaniment technique” called nkuluut, characterized by low pitched, gutteral sounds” (British Forum for Ethnomusicology Newsletter, 2001, vol. 1).

Video Example 12:Masai Warriors in Masai Mara 

According to Floyd, this type of performance serves both as a source of arousal and containment of that arousal, in delicate balance. “It will also be noted, however, it is not uncommon for the arousal to reach depths which make containment impossible, for nkuluut to overpower melody, resulting in extreme cases in seizures leading to catatonic states.” While such chanting can be organized according to the call and response litany format so commonly found in Africa, it can also take the form of a type of shouted interlock very close indeed to both Bushmen and Paleosiberian practice.

A bio-cultural link?

As we’ve learned, many non-human primates vocalize in a remarkably similar manner, as exemplified by the so-called “pant-hoots” commonly heard among bonobos, chimps and gibbons, a basis for the duetting and chorusing sequences illustrated above. There is, however, a significant difference. Their continuous, rapid-fire vocalizing is facilitated by large air sacs:

Figure 16.2 Siamang Air Sac

According to a study by Gwen Hewitt, Ann MacLarnon,  and Kate E. Jones,

apes and larger gibbons may be able to produce fast extended call sequences without the risk of hyperventilating because they can re-breathe exhaled air from their air sacs. Humans may have lost air sacs during their evolutionary history because they are able to modify their speech breathing patterns and so reduce any tendency to hyperventilate (The Functions of Laryngeal Air Sacs in Primates: A New Hypothesis, the International Journal of Primatology, Vol. 73, No. 2-3, 2002)²
.

Could we postulate, on this basis, a situation in the distant past where a newly speciated band of humans, no longer equipped with air sacs, were nevertheless attempting to vocalize in the “traditional” pant-hooting, duetting and chorusing manner, an effort which would have placed them dangerously near the threshold of hyperventilation, unconsciousness and trance? An essential difference between the vocalizing of their predecessors (X) and their own, newly minted, version (A1) would have been the need to work out some sort of strategy for avoiding or at least delaying hyperventilation and its effects by modifying their breathing patterns, as the article suggests.

Might the very real possibility of falling into trance while vocalizing in this manner provide a clue to the origins of shamanism? And since so much of the culture of indigenous peoples is based on experiences encountered during trance, might we also dare to attribute the origins of culture itself to an instinctive need to vocalize continually despite the loss of air sacs? 

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1. Merker's interest is primarily in unison synchronization rather than alternation, as in his view it is the former that must have played the greater role in the early development of music. After a brief email exchange in which I explained my views, he was unwilling to accept my position regarding the greater significance of alternation in such chorusing, as a possible precursor of hocket, which for him lacks the significance it has for me.

2. The whole issue of the role of primate air sacs in continuous vocalizing raises all sorts of interesting questions with respect to possibly related issues in musical evolution, such as the role of certain instruments requiring recycling of the breath, such as the didjeridoo, or instruments like the bagpipe, with air sacs built in.