Conference: Strong Interest in Music

The role of music in the history of language evolution is scheduled to play a leading role in the first day’s program at the Cradle of Language Conference in Stellenbosch, South Africa. Almost a third of the day’s addresses and sessions were set to be about music, language, and evolution.

One of the first people who will speak to the entire group is Steven Mithen, author of The Singing Neanderthals, which argues that music has a very long history. His thesis has been given the mnemonic name of “Hmmmmm,” meaning that the evolution of language was holistic, manipulative, multi-modal, musical, and mimetic.

Other scheduled to address the topic include:

• Nicholas Conard, an archaeologist concerned with dating artifacts like musical instruments from the Cro-Magnon/Neanderthal era.
• Nicholas Bannan, a choir master with a special interest in teaching children to sing.
• Ian Cross, a music professor at Cambridge.
• Didier Demolin, who investigates phonology.
• Wilmot James, a sociologist with a strong interest in evolution.

This interest in music suggests something about trends or fashions in thinking about speech origins. Although almost anybody who thinks in evolutionary terms will agree that there were words before there were sentences, there is disagreement as to when vocalizations became language. Linguists in the Chomskyan tradition hold that only with the emergence of syntax did speech become a distinctive, unique human trait. Scholars interested in speech and song’s co-evolution automatically have some other view of speech as expressive along many dimensions beside the syntactical. Such a full airing of views on the nature of the music/language relationship indicates strong interest in evolutionary accounts outside the Chomskyan tradition.