PREHISTORIC VOCALISM

In the beginning was the voice. Voice is sounding breath, the audible sign of life.

--Ibid.

Men sang out their emotions long before they could say what they were thinking. But naturally, we shouldn't think that "singing" here means the same thing as it does in a modern concert hall. We simply mean that our relatively monotonous spoken language and highly developed vocal music are differentiations of primitive utterances that had more in common with the latter than with the former when we say that speech originated in song. At first, these utterances were exclamative rather than communicative, similar to the crooning of babies, the roaring of many animals, and the singing of birds. In other words, they came from the individual's own inner craving without considering any other creatures. Our distant ancestors had absolutely no idea that it was possible to share thoughts and feelings with another person. --Otto Jespersen, Language, Its Nature, Development and Origin

Singing, or producing musical tones with one's voice, is so fundamental to human existence that its origins are long lost in antiquity and predate spoken language. The voice is presumed to be the original musical instrument, and there is no human culture, no matter how remote or isolated, that does not sing. Not only is singing ancient and universal, in primitive cultures it is an important function associated not so much with entertainment or frivolity as with matters vital to the individual, social group, or religion. Primitive man sings to invoke his gods with prayers and incantations, celebrate his rites of passage with chants and songs, and recount his history and heroics with ballads and epics. Even some cultures consider singing to be such an amazing act that they have creation myths claiming that it was sung into existence. It is likely the earliest singing was individualistic and improvisatory, a simple imitation of the sounds heard in nature. At what point the singing of meaningful, communicative sounds began cannot be established, but it was doubtless an important step in the creation of language. Many anthropologists believe the development of a lowered larynx (important to articulate speech, as it effectively makes the flexible lower tongue the front wall of the pharynx) was a relatively recent aspect of human evolution.

Since there are no bones in the human larynx, there is no direct physical evidence of prehistoric man's vocal apparatus from archaeological remains. We lack studies that correlate vocal characteristics to body size, the basic gender difference aside, but there is general belief large-bodied peoples (Slavs, for example) frequently produce low-voiced singers, while small-bodied peoples (Mediterraneans, for example) produce more high-voiced singers. If there is any validity in this, the voice that belonged to the owner of the prehistoric jaw bone unearthed in 1909, at Heidelberg, Germany, may have been remarkable--it is half-again the size of a modern jaw.

We can see that modern men have grown too large to fit into the armor of medieval knights, and even more recently, we suspect that the male alto voice type is becoming less common. This idea of body size and vocalism extends into more recent periods. Tempting though it is to see a relationship between such things, we lack the means to support it factually.

Based on our knowledge of the singing of present-day primitive peoples, a possible scenario of musical development would begin with simple melodic patterns based on several tones. Pitch matching (several persons singing in unison) might emerge next, with singing in parallel motion (the natural result of women or children singing with men), call-and-answer phrases, drone basses and canon as subsequent steps. All this could lead to an evolving sense of tonic and scale structure (primitive music often uses pentatonic scales) and the development of such basic musical devices as melodic sequences and cadential formulae.