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Current interests:
Songbirds : the morphology in birdsong? Keywords: language evolution, music/language
“How would you communicate with a fish? Drop it a line” (A joke told by my artificial intelligence “talking bird” search engine).
If there were aliens, how would they communicate?
Linguistic humor
What are emotions and how they work in terms of our brain? It is an unsolved problem of science, so I propose for simplicity concentrate on humor.
Lots of (linguistic) jokes are funny because they create a kind of
"hide-and-seek" effect in a brain.
Combination of two different kind semantic meanings.
The ambiguity can be created by use of
In all examples of jokes the second (unexpected) meaning, was usually a little embarrassing (having sexual or other not completely decent flavor). But it not has to be. The unexpected meaning per se already creates the funny effect. If we think of semantic representation in the brain as a specific many-dimensional point or vector, than during the discourse or telling the joke, the listener would look first for that point, as an answer to the question, where semantic meaning of a phrase is, only to realize at the end of the joke that the meaning is somewhere else, representing completely different vector, pointing somewhere else, as in hide-and-seek game. The last phrase/word establishes a new semantic connection, usually sarcastic, indecent or otherwise offending, thus making this new semantic meaning entering conversation by "back doors".
While not all humor can be described in this way, the other principal quality of humor is the following: the first semantic meaning, toward which the anecdote apparently is leading - is some kind of problematic reality, the serious and bad condition, with which we are preparing to deal, and which already began to give us a pain, develops at the end as a fiction, just linguistic construction, a tale, and another completely realistic and much less bad, though a little embarrassing, but already not concerning us reality enters our mind. It is why the joke is relieving. It tells us that the problem is not actually with us.
Songbirds (and language evolution), language, music.
There appeared, mainly in last decades, many scientific researches about songbirds - classification of songs, as f.e call, bridegroom song, territory, etc. Some articles focused on comparative study of human and bird learning processes and how it is implemented in the brain. (The male teaches its offspring to sing its specific "species" song, the young bird's brain undergoing similar process as a child's, learning language), some on musical-cultural aspects of song in human and birds, some claim to identify "morphology" in bird's song, as different endings appear in addressing f.e a female bird in process of courtship, etc.
Perhaps, it is not so much a language with bird's theme of conversation, which according to wikipedia are something like "Or sweet Canada, Canada, Canada" or "Frederika, Frederika..." or "Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you?". Obviously, the birds are very sociable.
Recent (it began half a century ago, but developed mostly in last decade) flute repertoire contains obligatory "avant-garde" pieces (mostly for flute solo), which employ very similar to bird's sound techniques: flagellate, microtonality, overtones etc.
As a flutist, living in a country ( Nature reservation) for the first time in my life, I thought, at first, that a fantastic bird singing concerts, which usually followed my exercises, were perhaps response to my flute music, but lately, ironically, I found myself trying to imitate them with my new avant-garde repertoire.
Not only me, but some modern composers, as f.e Messaen, have implemented or even based his compositions on birdsong.
When a person (with normal musical abilities), sings some familiar song, it is usually not connected to specific tonality, but rather on performer's vocal abilities. Only relative small part of people have what is called "absolute" hearing, which means they can say what is the frequency of the sound played (if it is Do, Re etc). ( I do not know, how this is implemented in the brain). But when listening to birds, it appeared to me, that they sing not only the same melody, but also in the same frequency. (I however did not tested this enough to claim absolute sense of hearing in the birds).
In 1999-2000 I have wrote (computer program) Universal Morphological Generator, which allowed to analyze human languages, including not-written languages, and even create infinite amount of artificial languages, morphologically correct. The most-ancient written (in cuneiform) language which is Sumerian was written in such a way as to correspond a sign to each morpheme.
It appeared to me, that if morphemes in the program were defined not with phonemes, but instead with some fixed musical sounds, the new musical language was defined, (it could be done with existing language, such as English or artificial musical language could be created) and perhaps some people, which have speech disorders could alternatively sing or play.
So, I experimented with language-based composition and have written computer program, which in different (specified) manners translated text to a music. For example, I have translated Genesis to a song. (It sounds like a story told by alien creature). Definitely, different languages sounded different even with the same instrumentation. And when I chose artificial "bird" instrument it sounded like some bird! So, perhaps their song is some language.
The talking bird "tuki" in my sister's house in Germany unexpectedly spoke to me , as I remained alone with a book on the sofa, it said "How do you do? Do you want some tea?" in correct grammatically Russian, which it never done before ( I mean, it either never spoke at all, or nobody ever heard it).
The birdsong research is an interesting theme for an evolutionally linguist, who studies origin of language, but since all agree that homo sapience did not originate in birds, it seems that perhaps , as a response to birdsong we rather developed musical instruments and musical ideas, which happened perhaps much after the language.
Though most of brain research, it seems, is focusing on studying language processing in human, as uniquely human, there exists some part of human society, which prefer music communication.
Selected Bibliography:
Pasted from <http://www.google.co.il/search?rlz=1C1CHMY_enIL315IL315&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=birdsong+language+music>
Pasted from <http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=17681908>
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences ISSN 0077-8923 CODEN ANYAA9
2005, vol. 1060, pp. 17-28 [12 page(s) (article)], Blackwell
Ment Retard Dev Disabil Res Rev. 2003;9(3):135-48. Links
Vocal learning in birds and humans.
Wilbrecht L, Nottebohm F.
J Comp Physiol A Neuroethol Sens Neural Behav Physiol. 2002 Dec;188(11-12):867-78. Epub 2002 Nov 20.
Links
Towards quantification of vocal imitation in the zebra finch.
Tchernichovski O, Mitra PP.
Copyright © Osnat Youssin 2009