Our pre-linguistic system was a “musi-language,” that time when music and language were yet to be separate.
Through emotional expression and earth-heart alignment, ritual allowed individual humans to bond with one another
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These original articulations activated in the brain, and its respective speech organs, a creation of rhythm and remembrance of melody that also enhanced a careful range of tonalities, utterances and gestural motor functions crucial for the earliest developments of social skill. Societies formed as groups of individuals maintained their beats and vocal harmonics to match everyone else’s. Seeking this unified expression of sound-synergy, many voices spontaneously became one voice, establishing a sense of tribe and belongingness within early humanoids, and accelerating social process among members of the group. |
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To Susanne Langer, ritualistic festivities primed language systems to take root beginning with the first primal, animal-like, emotional voicings stirred into utterance upon contextual association.
In deep history, after a successful group hunt, the first humanoid species celebrated by screaming, barking and hooting together as primates might still do today.
The contagious number of excited voices combined, eventually becoming habitually linked to patterns, repetitions, rewards, and recognition. Such rituals further led to sound and movement integrations including clapping and stomping, and the origins of dance and rhythm.
These motions transcended sound barriers limited to the external perception of audition. Internal vibratory resonance between air, larynx and vocal capacity slowly developed into the initial stages of proto-language.
Our pre-linguistic system was a “musi-language”, that time when music and language were yet to be separate.
Through emotional expression and earth-heart alignment, ritual allowed individual humans to bond with one another. These original articulations activated in the brain, and its respective speech organs, a creation of rhythm and remembrance of melody that also enhanced a careful range of tonalities, utterances and gestural motor functions crucial for the earliest developments of social skill.
Societies formed as groups of individuals maintained their beats and vocal harmonics to match everyone else’s.
Seeking this unified expression of sound-synergy, many voices spontaneously became one voice, establishing a sense of tribe and belongingness within early humanoids, and accelerating social process among members of the group.
Through a growing sense of occasion, reflective of the transitional stages between the ever present and present-as-past-as-present, early human recurrences generated concepts for hunt, peace, war, marriage, birth, death, food, love and season. This grew into primal sign systems and the first aboriginal vocabularies. As sound sequences became ever more familiar, they shifted into a potentiality for future symbolic representations.
Our ancient ancestors began to repeat sound fragments from their communal songs and, in combination with the powers of gesture and empathic touch, were able to organize tribal activity prior to linguistic conventions.
As more songs accumulated, linguistic and gestural call-and-response patterns continued to evolve. The brain’s language functions increased in capacity even whilst our musical intelligences for pitch, tonality, rhythm, beat, sequence, melody, and tune became ever more refined, specialized and sophisticated.