Of Music And Language
But the truth is that words don’t have meanings by themselves. That we can still make ourselves into speakers of languages, is all the more remarkable. While learning to speak our mother tongue, each of us must have confronted this fact. Each baby anywhere, must have known what there was to do and how to do it well, without any strain, and for good. Babies cope with this property of words — their arbitrariness — through the process of relating to the reality of energy they can relate to and know directly. Having done the job on themselves which puts them in contact with their own utterances which consist of the flow of sounds they can put out in the air, and knowing what characterizes each of their utterances because it has been willed, they educate their own hearing accordingly. This means, babies transfer to their involuntary auditory system that which they know to be at work in their voluntary phonation system. Equipped in this way, they begin to relate to the voices of the people around, and take note of the characteristics that are properties of energy which physicists have grasped and named: pitch, intensity, timber, harmonics. Knowing them directly as impacts of energy, babies let these impacts affect their ears. Thus, babies know persons around them by associating each with his or her unique voice. One’s own voice is known through the ear plus the bones of the head, plus the impacts of other energy manifestations such as one’s crying, one’s gurgling, one’s experiments with sounds and one’s emotions, in so far as emotions have also uttered components. Thus equipped, babies can notice the objective properties of other people’s utterances and come to the point of knowing physically exactly how voices are modulated by emotions. That is, they reach the reality of intonation, which is a human attribute in that it objectifies doubt, irritation, amazement, calm, resignation, commands, etc. Babies reach this reality by transcending linguistic elements which are retained singularly in every language.
8