SYMBOLIC ET NON

This metapragmatics carries basic implications for the deep

history of discourse and the emergence of musicking with which
it was bound. (I reserve the question of the emergence of ritual
for Chapter 7.) Tracing the route along which the reflexivity of
metapragmatics emerged is another way of exploring the path to
more and more complex and recursive theory of mind a path we
have already begun to follow. The solidification of metapragmat-
ics, meanwhile, points to the question of systems of indexes, and
this carries us toward one of the fundamental design features of
modern musicking: discrete pitch.

System without Symbol: A Phylogeny of Discrete Pitch

The defining of protodiscourse and indexical ordering reveals
that narratives making symbolic cognition the preeminent,
definitive feature of humanness finally overreach themselves,
obscuring the appearance of behaviors not specifically symbolic
and oversimplifying the history of our emergence. The missed
opportunity looms large in the case of musicking.
The symbolic leap to language, in Deacons view, was pre-
pared in part by a decoupling of the manipulative meanings of
earlier gesture-calls from selective pressures. In an analogous way,
the foremost combinatorial aspect in musicking, pitch processing,
could have emerged from the decoupling of prosodic intonational
patterns themselves from their emotive correlates, as proposed
at the end of Chapter 3. In the prehistories of both language and
music, according to these hypotheses, distinct epicycles formed
from earlier, selection-driven feedback cycles, and in each case
the internal dynamics of these epicycles gave rise to combinatorial
processing. In language this combinatoriality came to be embodied
at two levels, in sets of nonreferential phonemes making up words
(morphology) and in referential words making up larger utterances
(syntax or grammar). In music, instead, the combinatoriality was
constructed on a more basic set of percepts: discrete pitches. 31
The perception of discrete pitch, the basic elements of which
were introduced in Chapters 3 and 4, seems to arise naturally in

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normal human ontogeny and has no counterpart in the intona-

tional prosodic structures of modern language. Though musick-
ing can do without it without pitch altogether, indeed the vast
majority of the worlds musics exploit it. This point can be sharp-
ened: It is probably true that all musical cultures rely on discrete
pitch, if they do so with bewildering variety and need not do
so in every act of musicking. Even so qualified a generalization
as this will inspire cries of protest from certain quarters, so we
must immediately qualify it further. What is at stake is not an
assertion that all musical cultures conceptualize scales, or name
pitches, or even articulate the presence of individual pitches as
such, or, in performance, practice anything very close to stable
pitch tunings. What is asserted, instead, is that any act of pitched
musicking (except in some very recent, nontypical outgrowths of
complex musical traditions) creates certain intonational points of
attraction for the musical activity and that these are not arbitrary.
Pitches in acts of musicking are sometimes like fixed frequencies
(with associated overtones), as usually happens in the Western
classical tradition. But in most practices they are freer than this,
functioning as flexible centers of gravity along the spectrum
of frequencies around which the musicking is elaborated, like
attractors in a dynamic system; or acting, even more freely, as a
set of intervallic behaviors, in which only local relations between
adjacent points are determined, without any overall consistency
of frequency. None of these freedoms challenges the perception
of discrete pitch as here described; all of them, in fact, seem to be
founded upon it.
Despite all this variety, musicking ramifies discrete pitch in
ways that are consistent enough to suggest structural constraints
built into the human auditory system. The ramifications include
the general sense that melodies comprise smaller units, whether
these are thought of as individual pitches or the intervals between
adjacent points of momentary stability. They include also the
capacity, ubiquitous but not well understood, to relativize pitch,
witnessed in our ability to recognize the identity of a melody at

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different pitch levels think of the arbitrary starting-pitch for the

singing of Happy Birthday at a childs party.
Other complexities have to do with the interrelations of
pitches. Most fundamental is the striking sense of similarity of
pitches related in a two-to-one frequency ratio octave equivalence
or duplication, in the parlance of Western music. Aligned period-
icities of neural firing, probably basic to the experience of pitch
all told, might well underlie also this percept. 32 In effect it divides
the continuous spectrum of pitches into repeating segments, and
this division in turn gives rise to the exploitation of smaller inter-
vals within the segments, creating the pitch arrays conceptualized
in some musical cultures as scales.
Like the phonemes of language, the array of pitches exploited
differs from one musical culture to another and within cul-
tures as well. Even these culture-driven pitch choices, however,
show general, cross-cultural tendencies, again probably reflect-
ing general auditory structures and constraints. Very often they
cluster around or emphasize pitches related through frequency
ratios close to small integers (the fifth, 3:2, the fourth, 4:3, the
major third, 5:4, and a few more); in this they may represent a
perceptual extension of octave equivalence, less salient than it
but founded in similar neural processes. They form aggregates
of pitches that tend to be small in number, typically four to
seven within each octave. They usually also mark off unequal
intervals within the octave, an asymmetry that may abet the
widespread perception of tonal hierarchies or tonality here
defined as the sense of greater salience or centrality of one or
more pitches over others in a specific instance of musicking. This
sense, also sometimes called tonal encoding, is far more wide-
spread than some discussions of Western major/minor tonality
suggest perhaps, indeed, almost as ubiquitous as discrete pitch
perception itself. 33
Discrete pitch, in sum, seems to be a default mode in human
perception of certain kinds of aural stimuli, formed in normal
ontogeny and nearly ubiquitous in musicking. But how did it arise

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in our phylogeny? We have already connected this emergence to

feedback patterns of biocultural coevolution, to the prosodic-
emotive aspect of the ancient gesture-call system, and specifically
to the hominin elaboration of deictic that is, indexical mean-
ings associated with the general melodic shapes of the calls (see
Chapters 3 and 4). Weakened selection played a role here, loos-
ing formerly innate calls from strong selective pressures. As the
calls were offloaded then to cultural transmission, brain areas
long since fine-tuned for auditory scene analysis and emotive
communication were recruited for novel activities, namely, the
production and perception of vocalizations of increasing variety
and informational precision; this created an epicycle of deictic
or indexical vocalization. Cultural transmission in varied social
contexts encouraged greater diversity in the calls. This diversifi-
cation, working on the vocalizations and their ever more nuanced
intonational contours, redirected the employment of established
capacities, creating new pressures on them. Altered selection,
finally, led to the refinement of the auditory system so as to build
the frequency-tuned neurons and nascent networks involved in
pitch perception.
As finer gradations came to be perceived along the analog
spectrum of gesture-call prosody, then, another, distinct coevolu-
tionary mechanism arose, a discrete pitch epicycle. This was driven
in part by acoustical dynamics, especially the small-integer rela-
tions mentioned just now, and it created the cognitive founda-
tion for the myriad cultural elaborations of pitch perception
in musicking today. We have already proposed how rhythmic
entrainment and the tracking of melodic contour emerged from
patterns of early hominin technosociality, long before symbolic
cognition. Similar mechanisms probably precipitated an incipient
perception of discrete pitch from the indexical calls an addi-
tional development, analogous to entrainment and tracking, but
coming much later. 34 As in those other cases, the discrete pitch
epicycle did not depend on the prior development of symbols,
with their mediated distance and systematized reference.

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The archaeological, paleoanthropological, and even etho-

logical evidence for the emergence of discrete pitch perception
from such indexicality is suggestive, if indirect. The incremental
elaboration of hominin sociality through hundreds of millennia
outlines a general trajectory, albeit a slow and irregular one, of
increasing variety and precision of communicative gesture and
vocalization. This communication long remained indexical in
nature no more than we would expect, since indexicality took
chronological priority over symbolism in the evolution of the ani-
mate biosphere all told and formed the semiotic means of proto-
discourse. Within this realm of indexical meaning, hominins no
doubt commanded an unprecedented communicative richness by
the beginning of the Middle Paleolithic era, and probably even
farther back; but for hundreds of millennia and across at least
several species, the elaboration of indexicality toward greater
complexity, precision, and ordering predominated, with little or
no trace of symbols.
If the perception of discreteness in pitch coalesced out of the
deictic vocalizations in this communicative evolution, discrete
pitch combination into larger units something like modern
melody must have awaited additional attainments, especially
combinatorial cognitive processing. This development probably
occurred sometime in the Middle Paleolithic, near the appear-
ance of Neandertals and our immediate African ancestors. From
this moment the linkage of the increasingly discrete signals of
protodiscourse in hierarchic and combinatorial arrangement must
have begun to form. Again, a background of symbolism was not
required for these rudimentary pitch hierarchies, and the archae-
ological evidence indicates that discrete combinatorial cognition
in general emerged on a taskscape without modern language or
representational artifacts.
Weak, nascent rule governance within assemblages of dis-
crete signals was likewise not dependent on symbolism. It could
have emerged from tendencies within individual assemblages
themselves as an outcome, for example, of inherent acoustical

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relations among sets of signals and their associated indexical

meanings, all in the context of cultural transmission and diversi-
fication. In his schema for the development of protolanguage, Ray
Jackendoff has envisaged just such rule governance taking hold
in sets of protosyllables, and it could also have coformed with
emergent discrete-pitch arrays dividing the larger interval of the
octave. Both could have resulted in a rudimentary metapragmat-
ics featuring an ordering and governance of indexes. In the case
of pitch, as the perception of octave duplication grew, itself a
product of increasing precision of pitch perception in the new
biocultural epicycle, it would have set in motion a cascade of
novel capacities in pitch generation and exploitation, with the
result of increasing complexity within pitch arrays themselves.
The tendencies to associate particular pitches with, or dissociate
them from one another would have been strengthened by the
match or mismatch of the neural periodicities underlying pitch
perception all told. Even hierarchies of pitch, tonal encoding or
tonality, could have arisen as an emergent quality of such asso-
ciations that is, as a percept in effect ranking the strengths of
association and dissociation within the pitch arrays.
During this combinatorial stage, the winnowing of discrete
pitch from analog gesture-calls must have had another effect. The
calls themselves, we remember, took their deictic, emotive mean-
ings in some measure from their general intonational shapes. In
relation to these broader contours, discrete pitches represented
an atomizing of the shapes into newly perceived component units.
Later, modern melodies retaining some of the general contour-
indexicality of their ancient predecessors would be built from
these components. From the first, however, the atomization of
the old intonational contours created a new array of signals with
little connection to the old, indexical meanings. The new com-
ponent pitches were abstracted, distanced from the meanings of
the calls, in their very generation from the increasing precision
of indexical reference. And the abstract percepts gathered them-
selves into loosely governed systems, nonsymbolic but derived

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from indexical roots. In this process discrete pitch and combina-

torial cognition might have not only separated distinct structural
levels in the newly hierarchized vocalizations but also parceled
out meaning unevenly to the different levels.
This development in pitch perception might well have coin-
cided, again, with the first carving out of linguistic protosyllables;
it seems closely analogous to it, at any rate. But in the case of
protosyllables, we must imagine with Jackendoff a sequence of
developments in which meaning was strengthened by the com-
binations of those phonemic units into words. Discrete pitches,
instead, were never again so closely linked to meaning. To this
day they carry little or no indexical association; they are signs
only in extraordinary contexts, usually involving modern sym-
bolism. This abstracting of pitch from meaning represents a momen-
tous swerve in communicative means as, for the first time in the
long development of hominin communication, a new ingredient
appeared in vocalized gesture that attenuated meaning and refer-
entiality rather than bolstering and specifying them. In Chapter 7
we will follow the far-reaching consequences of this swerve in a
new kind of sociality, a transcendental sociality that could spon-
sor both ritual and religion and tightly bind musicking to them.
In several basic respects, this description of the emergence
of discrete pitch perception differs from the musical protolan-
guages advanced by Darwin, Brown, or even Fitch (see Chapter
3). First, unlike Browns conception of lexical tones, it does
not grant semantic content to pitches before language, but only
weak indexical reference to the gesture-calls from which pitches
were abstracted and to the melodies they eventually produced.
Discrete pitch perception, as it took shape, produced something
closer to an antisemantic absolution than to a sung meaning
before words. My description also suggests no counterpart to
Browns referential, melodorhythmic phrases anticipating
language. Second, this account does not imagine in the first
perceivers of discrete pitch the capacity to form melodies in
the manner of modern musicking (cf. Darwins gibbons, with

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their true musical cadences); instead, it regards the pitches

as a coevolutionary consequence, far down the road, of ancient
intonational calls. We may choose to term the initial, nondis-
cretized calls melodies, but we should not confuse them with
the constructive means of modern musicking. Fitchs conception
of a bare phonology or phonotaxis preceding language, finally,
comes closest to my model. But a crucial difference instead of
his full, prelinguistic, weakly semantic melodies, the equivalent
of birdsongs sung by our ancestors, it envisages a coevolution-
ary sequence whereby pitches arose from the gesture-calls, only
gradually to be systematized by the nature of their own acoustical
interrelations (and developing cognition of them) and then put to
use in the melodies of musicking.
In general, this description does not give music any chrono-
logical priority over language, a primary feature of most hypoth-
eses of musical protolanguage. It offers an alternative scenario
in which weakly rule-governed sets of signals of more than one type
emerged from the advancing protodiscourse of late Middle Paleolithic
taskscapes. It suggests that discrete pitch perception formed along-
side protolinguistic elements, and that both were abetted by
nascent hierarchic and combinatorial cognition, before either
modern language or musicking appeared. This conforms well to
deep-historical evidence of hominin communication; whereas
musical protolanguage hypotheses all disregard this evidence by
assigning to ancient hominins a panoply of full-fledged, modern
musical capacities.
In addition, the model has the advantage of distancing the first
systematization and rule governance from the kind of referential-
ity characteristic of modern language and symbolism. There is no
formal or abstract principle requiring that systematization be an
all-or-nothing force, complex in the manner of language or else
nonexistent. More generally, there is no requirement that indexes
cannot be systematized, at least loosely; Silversteins metaprag-
matics shows such systematization at work in modern discourse.
Peircean and neo-Peircean conceptions of symbolism require

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only this: that the peculiarly human ability to marshal meanings

invested in symbols demands a complex systematization and inter-
referentiality within the symbol set. The weak governance envis-
aged here of indexes, instead, would have encouraged linkages of
certain ones and discouraged linkages of others; but it would not
yet have spawned any fully mediated distance between the system
itself and the world referred to.
Arguments like Deacons that make all our complex cogni-
tive capacities dependent on a prior attainment of fully symbolic
thought run afoul of deep historical evidence, since this indicates
that complexities of behavior and cognition outstripping any non-
human ones in the world today emerged in the hominin line long
before the existence of language in its modern form. Symbolic
capacities of the Peircean sort came very late in hominin evolu-
tion, after other, looser forms of systematization had sprung up;
we need only attend closely to Middle Paleolithic, hierarchic and
combinatorial technologies to establish this. Whatever models we
construct and hypotheses we offer must allow for this presym-
bolic complexity in protolanguage and protomusicking as well as
in material interactions with the world.
In the emergence of discrete pitch perception, finally, just as
in the emergence of language, indexicality was not superseded,
but preserved and channeled in new directions toward its roles in
modern human communication. The mediated distance itself of
symbol systems, Deacon shows us, is one of two forms of indexical
function in them; this dependence of symbolism on indexicality
for its operation is a reason to posit models in which hominins tra-
versed a smooth development from the one to the other. Another
reason is the fact that humans still employ in many aspects of
communication remnants of the gesture-calls of our ancestors. It
will seem demeaning of musics wonders only to those who have
not attended carefully to the preceding chapters if I offer a general
definition relating music to those vocalizations: Musicking in the
world today is the extended, spectacularly formalized, and complexly
perceived systematization of ancient, indexical gesture-calls.

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