Why We Sing E-Book

Julia Hollander

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 505

Beschreibung

'A must-read for anyone moved by the power of song' - Lesley Garrett, CBE Singing has always been there for us, at the root of what it is to be a human being. Through personal anecdote and scientific fact-finding, this book celebrates the way song inspires and heals us, from the cradle to the grave, and in the process does for singing what The Well-Gardened Mind did for nature, and what Why We Eat did for our diets. As a singing therapist, teacher and performer, Julia Hollander is in a unique position to consider singing's importance to our wellbeing, charting its extraordinary influence on all aspects of our spiritual, emotional and physical lives. Why do parents feel compelled to sing to their newborns, and how does it help their development? What is it about song that brings communities together in harmony but also in protest? How come an activity that helps to embed languages and maths formulae can also be used to rehabilitate Long Covid sufferers? And what magic is at work when people who have lost the power to speak are still able to sing? By delving into her own life experiences, and calling on those of her fellow singers, the author seeks to answer these questions, underpinning her findings with the latest scientific research. In so many walks of life, people of all ages and backgrounds are waking up to the joys of singing, its power to give hope and connection in a fragmented world. Song-making is available in an increasingly broad range of social and therapeutic contexts, prescribed by doctors and community services. This book offers explanations for why this should be, and inspiration to anyone who loves to sing.

Leseprobe

Also by Julia Hollander:

When the Bough Breaks (2010)

Chicken Coops for the Soul (2011)

Published in hardback in Great Britain in 2023 by Atlantic Books,

an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Julia Hollander, 2023

The moral right of Julia Hollander to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

The author and publisher are grateful for permission to reproduce copyright song lyrics as follows: ‘Three Lions’ by David Baddiel and Frank Skinner, music by Ian Broudie. Copyright © 1996 Avalon Management Group Ltd. and B-Unique Music Ltd. All Rights for Avalon Management Group Ltd. administered by BMG Rights Management (UK) Ltd. All Rights for B-Unique Music Ltd. administered by Kobalt Music Group Ltd. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission. Reprinted by Permission of Hal Leonard Europe Ltd; ‘Daddy, What Did You Do In the Strike?’ by Ewan MacColl, published by Harmony Music Ltd, Roundhouse, 212 Regent’s Park Road Entrance, London NW1 8AW; ‘Singing for Our Lives’ by Holly Near, published by Hereford Music, PO Box 236, Ukiah CA 95482; ‘Reclaim the Night’ by Peggy Seeger, published by Harmony Music Ltd, as above; ‘Carry Greenham Home’ by Peggy Seeger, also published by Harmony Music Ltd; ‘Both Sides Now’ by Joni Mitchell, published by Westminster Music Ltd, Suite 2.07, Plaza 535 King’s Road, London SW10 0SZ. International copyright secured. All rights reserved.

Some names have been changed in order to protect people’s privacy.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN: 978 1 83895 362 1

E-book ISBN: 978 1 83895 364 5

Printed in Great Britain

Atlantic Books

An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

Ormond House

26–27 Boswell Street

London

WC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

To my students,

for all I have learnt from you

People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances with our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.

– Joseph Campbell

Contents

Introduction

SALAD DAYS

  1    Birth

  2    Baby Love

  3    Childhood

  4    Teens

FEELIN’ GOOD

  5    Community

  6    Healing

  7    Home

  8    Work

SEPTEMBER SONG

  9    Heaven

10    Protest

11    Ageing

ROCKIN’ CHAIR

12    Health

13    Death

Postlude

Further Reading

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Do you recall the spring of 2020? The first Covid lockdown, and with it the silence. Following the same trajectory as the virus, from China through the Middle East and across the continent of Europe, it descended on my street a couple of weeks before Easter. That first morning, I lay in bed thinking what a relief it was not to hear the usual orchestra of grinders and drills and engines; even the ring-road traffic, my city’s perpetual backing track, was gone. In their place, as if from nowhere, a magnificent chorus of garden birds were singing their little hearts out. Granted, it was the time of year when most creatures are getting their mojos back after the trials of winter, but this felt so much more spectacular than usual. Was it just because I was taking time to pay attention, or had the local finches called in extra forces? I remember lying there entranced by their sweet polyphony: the filigree patterns of their voices demonstrating such range and such joy.

As the first spring lockdown turned to summer, news came from around the world that nature’s singing revival was really taking off. In the Atlantic, humpback whales were improvising new whistles and chirrups, completely different from the ones commonly used for echolocation. Now the booming of container ships had ceased, they were able to sing to one another across vast distances, hour after hour, creating more and more complex music. Biologists in the San Francisco Bay area took advantage of the tranquillity to home in on their local sparrow population. By comparing 2020 with a body of recordings amassed since the 1970s, they discovered that because the birds were no longer straining to be heard, they had developed more intimate mating songs, with much bigger ranges. Their voices were reclaiming acoustical space that had been monopolized by machines ever since the Industrial Revolution.

While the songbirds enjoyed their best season for 150 years, we human singers were in a state of confusion. Every live music venue, every church and hall and theatre and pub stood silent as singers and other performers turned their skills to shelf stacking and street sweeping. Yet on doorsteps and balconies and all over the internet, suddenly everyone seemed to know all the words to that Second World War classic, ‘We’ll Meet Again’, even the kids in the school playground. Along my street on a Thursday evening, once our clapping in honour of NHS workers was done, somebody dusted off their saxophone and accompanied a rousing communal rendition of a similarly vintage number, ‘Over the Rainbow’.

In a new world order where meeting up and socializing had become fraught with danger, public singing felt like a kind of compensation. At least it enabled us to share our helplessness. Looking back on that time, I think of those pandemic songs as something like the gold used by Japanese kintsugi potters to mend their bowls: bright and precious, binding our fragmented lives together.

Singing as liquid gold? Do you think that’s going a bit far? Are you remembering those singalongs down your street sounding rather less than golden? To which I’m quick to defend my metaphor, because this is a feeling thing, not an aesthetic one. And because, in my opinion, beauty is in the ear of the beholder just as much as the eye. I’m not denying that some voices appeal more than others. I have my own personal list of 24-carat singers, some of whom I am fortunate enough to have heard live. It still gets my heart racing to remember pogoing to Joe Strummer at the Friars Aylesbury in 1983, or a Prom a decade later, standing straight underneath Dame Gwyneth Jones as Isolde’s ‘Liebestod’ poured out of her. Indeed, during my twenties and thirties, I had a daily immersion in some of the greatest British singing of my generation.

My job was as a stage director in opera, surrounded all day every day by extraordinary voices. You think opera singers are divas and prima donnas? Well, think again; in my experience they couldn’t be more down to earth. I know how hard they work, how precarious their careers, and how humble their craft. They have nothing mechanical or shiny with which to modify what they do: no equivalent of the spell checks and word counts and web browsing I am currently making use of in order to bring you this. Compared to the super-technological world where most of us work, theirs is surprisingly wholesome and unsophisticated, their only tools the inner workings of their bodies.

Once you start thinking about great singers like this, there are only two directions your own singing can go: either you feel so overawed by what they’ve achieved you keep your throat firmly shut, or else you cast aside your inhibitions and start focusing on what you yourself have to offer. Gradually, very gradually, I chose the latter. The fact I would never sing like Dame Gwyneth didn’t mean I couldn’t practise her art. It took several twists of fate to mould me into someone who could earn a living from singing: both in groups and as a soloist, teaching and leading and using it therapeutically. I found myself working with people from diverse backgrounds: young and old, across a huge range of demographics and cultures, many of them marginalized by sickness or disability. What they had in common was that they all sang.

And then came Covid. While professional singers from Beyoncé to the local buskers were out of work, the rest of us were positively encouraged to step into the breach. Do you remember Prime Minister Boris Johnson standing over a sink soaping his hands and burbling ‘Happy Birthday’, not once but twice, so as to ensure the deadly germs got washed away? The idea was that we should all do the same. And why ‘Happy Birthday’? Well, it’s extremely well known, which must have ticked the inclusivity box. The singing needed to last at least twenty seconds, which narrowed the field, but could still have been something like the chorus of ‘Stayin’ Alive’ (also recommended for maintaining the correct pace while doing CPR). The trouble with the Bee Gees and many others is they are still in copyright, and though Warner Music once controlled the rights to ‘Happy Birthday’, in 2015 a federal judge declared it part of the public domain. So everyone could sing it with impunity.

I liked the fact we were being officially advised to sing, for the sake of our health. It felt like a licence to enjoy ourselves, or at least be distracted from Covid anxiety for regular bouts of twenty seconds. I just wish they’d found us something easier. Have you noticed this? As the most sung song in the world (at the last count, it is said to have been translated into over twenty languages) you’d have thought it would be more user-friendly. It starts accessibly enough, swinging along between the fifth and the first note of the scale. But on the third ‘birthday’, just as you’re beginning to relax and have some fun, you’re suddenly expected to spring up a whole octave. Which for the average, underused singing mechanism, let alone one burdened by virus worry, is a manoeuvre akin to shifting the gear stick in your car from first to fourth with nothing in between.

That other lockdown favourite, ‘Over the Rainbow’, also has an octave leap, this time right at the opening on the two syllables of ‘Somewhere’. Apparently when Decca released it in 1939, this was a worry for the composer who feared it would prove challenging for amateurs (which mattered, because if you wanted a hit in those days, the fans had to be able to sing it). Interestingly, no one ever complained. Perhaps Judy Garland and a magical film were enough to stir punters into making the extra effort. Or else having that gear change right at the beginning meant everyone felt forewarned, ready for a joyful jump start. Over the intervening decades, that particular octave has been much admired, as it so perfectly encapsulates the film’s main theme: a longing to escape ‘dry, arid, colourless’ Kansas, as the lyricist stated when he first conceived the song. In vocal terms, the opening A flat below middle C feels gritty on the chest: a place you don’t want to hang around if you can help it. But the A flat an octave higher is completely different. Bang in the centre of the singing range, that note has all the potential to glitter and shine. Thus, the musical setting of ‘Somewhere’ is the sonic equivalent of being transported from black and white to technicolour; from dreary Kansas to colourful Oz. Or from lockdown incarceration back to life again.

*

This book was born during that strange singing time in 2020: in those performances on the doorstep or at the bathroom basin. What was it about singing that had made it such a healing force during the pandemic? In this high-tech age of ours, when we can listen to 24-carat singing at any moment of the day, edited and tuned to perfection, how come DIY singing continues to happen at all? Why are we compelled to pursue such an apparently useless activity?

I decided to begin my investigations with the science. I felt emboldened by the way scientific stats and facts had become so accessible during the pandemic; so useful in explaining what was happening to us. I went in search of their equivalent for singing, in a range of disciplines from neurology to behavioural psychology. And then I tried to make sense of the findings by relating them to real-life experience.

The process has taken me back over a whole lifetime of singing: its intimate pleasures and its cravings to be heard; the root of my well-being but also my fragility. As a foil to my personal stories, I’ve included testimonies from my students and collaborators, and also from well-known professionals I have worked with over the years. Together, we take a good, long look at what is significant about singing through each of the four seasons of life: the springtime of learning and self-discovery, the summer of early adulthood (work and community and household responsibility), the autumnal years with their broadening perspective, and the wintertime when everything drops away. With the help of my daughters, I have also recorded a playlist to accompany each chapter which you can access via the QR code on the cover. It’s not comprehensive (mainly due to copyright strictures) but it’s our way of filling an obvious gap in the reading experience. Who knows, perhaps it will inspire you to sing along, to join us in exploring this extraordinary act of making music with nothing but our own bodies.

SALAD DAYS

CHAPTER ONE

Birth

If he had remained in his original state, the weakness of mortal man would not have been able to endure the power and resonance of his voice.

– Hildegard of Bingen

I ask if you sing and you say, ‘Only in the shower!’ And I smile to think of you there, with the water cascading all around. You throw wide your arms, tilt back your head and let go of all those responsibilities and tensions you’ve been holding on to for God knows how long. As they get washed away, the spaces they leave behind are like echo chambers inside you: your chest, your skull, your pelvis. Your throat lifts towards the downpour, your breath courses through and you open your mouth to let out the sound, a note or two, a tune even. It feels good. You are making your body reverberate like one great, human-sized speaker.

The shower is the one place where you don’t feel self-conscious about your singing voice, you tell me… where you can just allow it to run free. It happens compulsively, even a bit crazily, like dancing in a summer rainstorm. Sometimes in the shower you could even imagine that singing was what you were born to do.

And I say, ‘Let me tell you why.’

THE LARYNX

At just a few weeks’ gestation, when your human form is little more than a kidney bean, from your primitive gut appears a tiny shoot. As it unfolds, it splits into two separate branches, the trachea and the oesophagus, still joined at the top by what will become that most complex and delicate piece of anatomy, your larynx. In a separate part of your beany form grow a series of little loops which hark back to your aquatic ancestry: the part of you that still loves being underwater. Were you a fish, they would become gills, but instead they start to form the bones around the jaw, the middle ear and the tube of the pharynx: the main resonating chamber for your voice. By the third of your nine months in the womb the pharynx is fused with the larynx. You are still an underwater creature, not even half ready to live in air, but already your singing instrument is assembled and so you can start to practise. Your great big infant tongue flexes and curls, your lungs rehearse their in–out bellows movement using amniotic fluid, and the domes of the diaphragm get strong by silently hiccupping the hours away.

You also pass the time by honing your listening skills. The constant drumming of your heart is more than twice the speed of your mother’s: a mini drum creating interesting cross-rhythms against Mama’s deeper beat. Your hearing ability develops fast, more and more attentive to this sort of thing. When an ultrasound scanner comes to find you, you twitch and turn away, responding to frequencies inaudible to the rest of us.

Pregnant with my first baby, I remember being eager to provide her with lots of lovely music. At the same time, these were my last months of independence and my freelance work schedule was stupidly busy. One time-saving solution was to chuck a CD of The Magic Flute on the sound system in the car and trust the theory that listening to Mozart in the womb helps babies thrive, and can even increase their IQ. As the Queen of the Night delivered her mighty coloratura aria, my daughter lay disarmingly still, and I crossed my fingers it was a sign of how hard she was listening.

I later discovered that what was known as the Mozart Effect was based on listening to piano music rather than the composer’s operas, and that anyhow the in utero observations had been made on rats rather than humans. The simple, old-fashioned truth was more likely to be that whatever music is good for Mama is good for baby. What if I’d been one of those people who hate Mozart’s music, but made myself listen to it because of the supposed benefits to my progeny? I hate to think how she might have turned out.

Now I’ve done the research, I know that what a growing babe likes to hear is what is familiar and close by. While I was rushing about, the main thing she was listening to was my voice: not as clearly as she would postpartum; more like what you hear when you duck your head under the bathwater. In that sub-aquatic environment, the consonants and other percussive stops and starts of words become blurred. But foetal development experts with their minuscule waterproof microphones have discovered that in the womb you learn to recognize certain repeated pitches (especially the higher ones), and some rhythmic patterns. In other words, you hook into the tuneful aspects of what is going on up there in Mama’s vocal tract. To you, it sounds like singing.

Then one day that song is much, much louder, full of unfamiliar screeches and grunts. If you could catch the words, you would hear a spasmodic descant line calling, ‘Nooooo! I can’t do it… I need an epidural NOW!’

Your warm crown suddenly feels cold. Something grasps your shoulders, twisting you out into a wide-open space. Bright light penetrates your closed eyelids. In through your nostrils seeps the first draught of air: at last, the fuel your vocal system has been waiting for. Down your throat it pours, between the flaps and folds of the larynx which act like a valve, pulling firmly shut behind. The tiny, closed folds (no more than 8 mm long) create a compression so tight that the lungs inflate, forcing the last drops of amniotic fluid back down into your bloodstream. Never again will you be that fish-like underwater creature, because the trapped air is starting to trigger a whole new gas exchange system through your body.

With nothing for you to grab or push against, you flex and extend backwards, slippery arms flung wide, legs kicking. All the muscles in your abdomen contract, as primal as any of Mama’s convulsions that shoved you out here. Under such pressure, your diaphragm bulges upwards, shooting used air from your lungs up against the folds. This is the moment at which your larynx relinquishes its valve function and becomes instead the only naturally vibrating instrument in the world. The pressure from underneath splits the vocal folds apart. But they are elastic and moist and immediately recoil, sucking back together. Split and recoil; split and recoil. When filmed and put into slo-mo on YouTube, the movement of these little folds looks like some fleshy deep-sea creature, rippling on the current. The real-time version is what creates sound, but not anything recognizable: more like the buzzing noise from a kazoo, or the mouthpiece of a brass instrument detached from its body. Fortunately, your larynx is well fused to your head, and the buzz can go there in search of room to resonate; up into the space at the back of your mouth, your nose, your sinuses, your eyes and ears…

The very first time the teeny vocal folds vibrate in this way, they open and close at about 450 cycles per second, which scientists would call a fundamental frequency of 450 hertz, and musicians would say is surprisingly close to the note they use to tune an orchestra (concert A being 440 hertz). If it doesn’t sound much like a conventional instrument, that’s because everything is squidged up, enhancing the acoustic energy and generating lots of overtones, giving your voice that extremely penetrating quality. You bend and straighten again, letting in more air, and the notes coming from your mouth expand to a range of around five tones, each one louder and stronger than before.

The midwife who dragged you out of the birth canal reaches for her clipboard. On the Apgar score used for newborns she puts a tick beside ‘breathed and cried lustily’. From her point of view, this primitive song marks a healthy transition into extra-uterine life; it is your first milestone.

As the mother, I recall my relief on hearing that first scream, then the way it turned to consternation as I realized my job was to comprehend it. A pleading yelp? An agonized sob? A shriek of glee? I wept. The ancient Romans would have understood. They regarded this infant aria as so significant that it required a special name, vagitus (meaning a moaning or a roaring), and its very own deity: from the Vatican Hill in Rome where the Pope now lives, the seat of divination and prophecy, came Vaticanus, god of the birth cry. We parents are destined to worship at his shrine. Were I to moan or roar like that, my vocal folds would be in a dreadful state. But a baby’s are special: their structure is simpler than an adult’s, and more flexible. They also contain a high level of gooey hyaluronic acid which acts as a shock absorber, enabling them to go on and on, and on.

My best maternal urge was to stuff that gaping mouth, thereby giving the larynx a chance to perform its second non-singing role (and in terms of survival, arguably its most important one). This has to do with those two separate branches that unfolded when you were a kidney bean, with the larynx located at their junction. In order to divert food and drink away from the lungs and straight down into the stomach, the cartilaginous flap of the epiglottis at the top of the larynx must flip over the trachea like a lid. In adults, this means we can’t breathe and swallow at the same time; but when we are babies we can. Because a baby’s larynx sits high up behind the nasal cavity where the epiglottis can lock on to the soft palate, forming a permanent seal so air can pass continually from nose to lungs and back again. Simultaneously, milk sucked into the mouth travels through channels either side of the tongue, straight down into the tummy. It’s a clever trick that means not a single moment is wasted in baby’s busy growing regime.

While all that’s happening, you still manage to fit in your regular music practice. From the moment you are born, you are adept at distinguishing the timbre of your mother’s voice from any other. Surveys on young infants show they are especially skilled at processing musical structures: they can follow a regular beat and recognize when it falters. One of the first ways they show this is by using their mouth as a percussion instrument: as they suck, they create rhythmic patterns that mimic the unique metre of their parents’ speech. When they stop sucking and cry, they so relish the intonation of their ‘mother tongue’ that they use its pitch patterns: the French bébé wails on a rising note and a German Kind on a falling one.

When eventually baby no longer feels obliged to spend every waking hour filling his or her belly, the larynx begins a process unique in the animal kingdom: a slow dive from the feeding position behind the nose, down into the throat. Every millimetre it descends will profoundly alter the way it resonates, because as well as lengthening the space above, it is also dragging the tongue with it. Not that pointy bit you’ve been lapping away with, but the much bigger muscle you can feel under your chin, arching downwards. This vertical lump is responsible for moulding the buzz made by the larynx into all sorts of interesting shapes for sounding vowels.

As a shower singer, you will know the importance of vowels because they are where the sound gets to flow. In comparison, consonants (created mainly at the front of the mouth) tend to resist that flow. Listen to your voice coming back at you off the bathroom tiles: the consonants are your percussion section, holding everything together, while the vowels carry the melody in all its glory. Gradually, a baby’s descending vocal apparatus starts to refine its vowel production. Starting with a generalized ‘uh’, they soon become able to form an ‘ee’ and an ‘oh’, an ‘ah’ and an ‘oo’… If your family is Spanish, then you only have five distinctive vowel phonemes to learn; if they are English and their accent somewhat RP, your tongue will have to tackle around twenty (making it one of the most complex vowel systems in the world).

For a long time, biologists assumed the human throat must have evolved like this in order to maximize our vocal ability. But latterly they have started to wonder whether in fact it is just a happy accident, brought about by another aspect of our evolution: bipedalism. A few million years ago, when hominids first got their vertical acts together to run, one huge change their bodies had to make was for their spinal cords to enter the brain case not from behind (as they do in four-legged beasts) but from underneath. This new position left far less space between the spinal cord and the mouth where the larynx used to go: a space that had already been reduced by a shrinking of teeth and jaws as our ancestors started gnawing on meat for their major source of brain food. Nature’s solution was to find a new home for it down the throat. But having relocated, poor old larynx found itself out of a job.

While hominids had been loping about on all fours, the laryngeal valve mechanism had been essential, helping to support the arm muscles for knuckle-walking or climbing. It would still be useful in the lower position, whenever anyone braced themselves to pick up a heavy weight, or thwacked something. But now our forebears were upright there wasn’t nearly so much chest bracing to do, and gradually the system lost its strength, became lighter and more flexible. Which, completely coincidentally, meant its sound-making changed from something like the gruffness of an ape, to the loveliness of what we have today.

And so, at this early stage in human history, we arrive at the first answer to the question of why we sing: because we can.

By a simple accident of evolution, we have this particular relationship between our breathing apparatus and the laryngeal valve: an elegantly vertical alignment which allows subtle control of the air pressure passing through our instrument. The only other creatures on Earth to possess such a mechanism are our friends the songbirds, and though birds and humans took very different evolutionary paths, it is a sure sign that we share a common reptilian ancestor, hundreds of millions of years ago.

The birds’ equivalent to the larynx is called a syrinx, after a nymph in Greek mythology who was transformed into reeds from which the first panpipes were made. The syrinx sits at a junction where the windpipe meets two tubes, each coming from a separate lung. This means that, rather than a single valve, it has a double one which can draw air from either lung, left or right or both. The two-way system is what allows birds to layer note upon note, ornamenting and harmonizing to their own tunes.

But is the possession of a functioning piece of anatomy a satisfactory reason for why we sing? Founding father of modern biology Charles Darwin felt not. Whatever creature was doing the singing, be it man or beast, he thought there must be some reason behind it, some sort of volition. Having allowed himself to be waylaid by lesser-known crooners like the sea robin with its vibrating swim bladder, Sir Charles turned his full attention to the birds of the sky, and especially those whose artistry he admired. Why were they making such glorious music? mused the great scientist. And specifically, why the male birds? Was it by any chance in order to charm the opposite sex? Were they competing with one another so females would choose the best performers as their mates? Was this some sort of avian X Factor? For someone like Darwin, a signed-up member of the patriarchy, the answers were obvious: yes, yes and yes. And for the next century or more, biologists dutifully followed his trend, searching out all manner of creatures whom they reckoned must be using their singing in order to compete for sex: from household mice doing it at supersonic levels, to Texan bats with such improvisatory vocal passion that their observers called it romance.

Once you go hunting for sex calls, it’s amazing how easily you find them, even in a humble back garden like mine. Listen to that handsome blackbird’s stunning scatting technique, or the cheeky robin redbreast chirruping wildly, and it’s obvious what they’re after. Not only do they have double the vocal facility of humans, they are also flagrant enough to use it as sexual currency.

And what about us? Should we accept our common ancestry and admit this is also the reason why humans sing? Might we too be prepared to warble away for whoever we fancy in that row of females up on the phone wire?

LULLABIES

Let’s just take a moment to breathe, and listen again. Now I’m hearing something gentler. Something that seems to be coming from that slightly less-black blackbird, or the inconspicuous little robin without a red breast. Only recently, in our post-Darwinian world, have biologists begun to seriously contemplate why it is that female birds sing. And they are coming up with some interesting answers. At Flinders University in Adelaide they have been watching mother birds calling to their eggs while they incubate them. Meanwhile, they monitor the heartbeats of the embryos inside, and find they are fluctuating in response to the calls. When the babies hatch, it turns out that those who listened most attentively have the best tunes. And guess what? Mama favours her most talented tweeters, feeding them her juiciest titbits. I’m not suggesting we try and shoehorn this style of parenting into a human context, I’m simply pointing to an example of birds singing for other reasons besides sex. And those birds are female.

Returning to the story of human evolution and bipedalism, we know that besides the lowering and softening of the larynx, another big adjustment that happened when our ancestors decided to run around was that the pelvis had to change shape, becoming narrower. From the point of view of vocal production, the narrow pelvis and its position directly below the breathing apparatus has a lot to do with what singers like to call ‘support’, controlling the pressure of our exhalation and thereby the sound we make. For women it is also highly significant because it determines the way our babies come into the world: painfully, and prematurely. Because the pelvis is narrow, so is the birth canal, which means babies have to be born when they’re still small enough to get through; they therefore arrive shockingly undeveloped and in need of nursing. And it is in this activity that we arrive at another theory for why we sing, based on female human behaviour.

First posited by Dr Dean Falk, neuroanthropologist at Florida State University, the ‘putting down baby’ theory asks us to imagine a young hunter-gatherer mother out foraging. Baby is somewhat clingy, then as now, and whenever Mama tries to put them down, they go off on one. This is a serious dilemma because she needs her hands free to pull meat from some carcass she’s just found, and papooses haven’t yet been invented. Her solution is to pop her offspring somewhere safe and comfortable and try to reassure them she’s not far off, using the lovely pliable instrument that so recently dropped into her throat. With it she lulls them, until they cease their moaning and roaring and calm down. Preferably they nod off. And voilà: our ancestors who went on to survive and thrive were the ones who sang not the most seductive songs but the best lullabies.

In every culture across the globe, people still sing to their babies. Not only that: when asked to identify the function of a lullaby from a foreign culture, whatever the language, adults consistently get it right. Babies show the same recognition by nodding off. There is something about its soothing pulse, the way the melody flows so seamlessly, that means everyone seems able to distinguish a lullaby from any other song. They are also universally able to sing it. Developmental psychologists who do surveys of such things observe that even parents who regard themselves as complete non-singers make an exception for their babies. However many Mozart CDs they may have hanging around, pretty soon they cotton on to the fact that live singing is preferable to the sound system. Realizing it has such positive effects is enough to prevent them feeling self-conscious, or worrying about whether they are any good. Their progeny don’t mind if they remember only a couple of lines; in fact repetition is something babies love. From the abundance of YouTube videos showing infants in bouncy chairs mesmerized by a parent’s vocal, they also turn out to be reassuringly non-judgemental.

I’m trying to recall when I first had the impulse to sing to my firstborn. I think it was once everyone had gone away and we were alone together, side by side in the hospital ward. They’d left her in a Formica cot, all swaddled and still, with me in a daze of euphoria and exhaustion, trying to reassure myself that parenting really was going to be my thing. I’d not been around babies for a few decades and certainly didn’t have an instant repertoire of lullabies to hand. My voice was knackered after riding all that pain, but gently, ever so gently… I think it must have been my go-to jazz standard, ‘Summertime’. It was the depths of winter, but hey, no one complained.

This scene has to do with the love hormone, oxytocin. Long associated with women’s uterine contractions and with lactation, it also enjoys a significant place in brain activity when it comes to bonding. From a baby’s vantage point, early oxytocin-inducing experiences are an investment for a lifetime: the more we get at the start, the better we will be at reducing anxiety and dampening stress responses later on, let alone generally forming close bonds with others. The levels of oxytocin in my body straight after labour must have been super-high, but what about my babe-in-a-box? Could something as removed as singing stimulate production of the love hormone in her?

In a study from Wisconsin, biological anthropologist Leslie Seltzer and her team set out to investigate a long-held belief that oxytocin levels increase only in response to direct physical contact. Having put young children under the stress of a classroom presentation and a test, they asked the mums to comfort them. One group was allowed to give their kid a hug, while another did it remotely, using their voices down the phone. The question was, could the same alchemy occur? Well, when the Wisconsin researchers compared urine samples from the children who’d only heard their mothers with the ones who’d received a hug, they showed exactly the same increase. Thereby reassuring a whole generation of working mums that FaceTime cuddles aren’t far off the real thing, and that singing on a hospital ward is a great way to begin the bonding process.

Once we were safely home, and Ellie named, I could start building my repertoire of seasonal soothers: a restful version of Mariah Carey’s ‘All I Want for Christmas’ being top of the bill, with ‘Silent Night’ a close second. These two became forever associated with my own ‘putting down baby’ quandaries, needing my hands if not to tear the flesh from a carcass, then at least to chuck something in a casserole. I have never since been able to sing ‘… all is calm, all is bright… ’ without picturing myself manacled by oven gloves, balancing on one foot while keeping the baby chair bouncing with the other.

As spring approached, I test-ran everything from ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’ to Lou Reed’s ‘Perfect Day’, but the one that stayed at number one and never went out of season was a Czech carol with a lovely lilting tune, ‘Little Baby, Sweetly Sleep’. Its lyrics asked for precisely what was required, and I worked hard on getting the maximum hypnotic power out of its old folk melody. As infant psychologist Sandra E. Trehub and her colleagues in Canada have successfully demonstrated, not only do infants who are sung to feel loved, they also stay settled for twice as long as those who don’t get to hear a lullaby.

I rocked the pram and sang, and rocked and sang, listening out for Ellie’s breathing patterns to lengthen and ease. When I felt convinced she was deep in the Land of Nod, I would wind down the vocal, tiptoe to the door and… waagh! she was wide awake again.

Had Sir Charles been around, he’d have said it was my fault for ceasing my song. Not because he knew anything about ‘putting down baby’, but because he had observed a lot of wild horses and listened to the noises they make. Whether it’s the clucking of a hen or a mare grunting and ripping at grass, a methodical, pulsing sound is an essential survival mechanism for social animals. They use it to let one another know they’re safe. Any sign of danger, and the animal who notices goes silent. The others quickly follow suit and soon everyone is scanning the environment for whatever that threat might be. In nature, silence signals danger: that’s why you feel a tensing in your gut when the soundtrack fades just before the murderer enters the shower, or the shark pulls its victim under. And it is why my singing was lovely and relaxing for Ellie, but stopping was unacceptable.

INFANT DIRECTED SPEECH

Somewhere between singing and stopping, parents will commonly use a special sing-song style for communicating with young children. Known as Infant Directed Speech, or IDS, the antique word for it is ‘prosody’ which comes from the Greek pros, meaning ‘through’, and ody, meaning ‘song’. However little parenting experience we’ve had, and whatever language we speak, IDS is a totally natural thing to do. You also hear staff using it in care homes and hospitals, where it’s not always welcome. I use it these days for the dog, and he seems to like it. The way it exaggerates the range of tones and dynamic changes in the voice is so close to song that I feel IDS is worth adding to my list of reasons why singing evolved as part of human nurture.

It takes an old video recording of baby Ellie to remind me how extreme my personal version once was. Here I am, hidden behind my camera but my voice revealing all, as I film my first daughter at around three months, chewing contentedly on her favourite soft toy, a floppy bunny: ‘OO… Bibble Bobble – what’s thaaat?… Tasty rabbit… nyum-nyum… Sooo tasty!’

I’m immediately struck by my silliness, and my eagerness to sanction her baby adventures. My emotional range has moved on from the comforting nursing stage and entered a much more expansive realm. And because the region of her brain that processes feelings is already quite developed, it is the emotion in my voice that most engages her interest. Here on the written page, you have only flat symbols with a few dots and dashes to indicate the rhythm, but in your reader’s inner ear I ask you to imagine something a bit like Kate Bush circa 1978.

A linguistics expert would probably have a lot to say about this: that I am unconsciously using my upper register because in the natural world a high pitch is associated with a small body, thereby indicating an absence of threat. Darwin would concur, pointing out that many creatures use such tactics in order to repel or attract others. In his social-signalling system, low-frequency sounds would be deemed inappropriate for my baby because they convey large size and authority or even aggression. I therefore reserve my deeper tones for controlling the dog, who already understands his own species’ low-frequency signals. It might also be that I am doing something Sandra E. Trehub has found in her studies: emphasizing my voice’s unique timbre, its characteristic inflections, so my little one can identify me. Come to think of it, this is probably a major reason why I exaggerate things for the dog: so he’ll recognize me when I call him back in the park. My prosody offers an extreme vocal fingerprint so that, whether for baby or hound, there is no doubt that this is me.

What I know for sure is that I’m being singy-songy because Ellie doesn’t understand my words but is familiar with my inflections, having listened to their underwater version for all those months in the womb. Were a musician to write down a score of my vocals, they would be able to mark in all the changes from loud to soft, staccato to legato, and everything in between. They could transcribe every syllable in my up-down, rollicking delivery as notes, showing precisely the pitch and duration and dynamic I use to express encouragement or love.

In Trehub’s research programme, the psychologists tested how strikingly well IDS communicates emotion. They recorded mothers chatting to their babies in four familiar contexts, asking them to express approval and prohibition, attention-calling and finally comfort. The mums were also recorded speaking to adults in similar scenarios. These recordings were then ‘filtered’ of their lexical content (the words), leaving behind simply their melodic contours. Then a new sample group of adults was introduced to listen to these doctored phrases and guess the emotions behind them. They found it much harder to identify the meaning of the adult-directed speech than the infant-directed one, because the latter contained so many musical signals, enabling them to clearly comprehend the emotional intention.

SONGS BEFORE WORDS

You may already have noted that Ellie sucking on her floppy bunny is a perfect illustration of what Freud would call the oral stage of development. But if we try and think about singing rather than sex, make ourselves listen rather than watch, we perceive a different aspect of development going on. While at the front of her mouth she may be tasting everything, at the back she is busy experimenting with the brand-new voice created by her descending larynx.

‘Ba-ga-goo,’ she goes, as she twists the toy against her tongue. Her up–down vocal is charmingly musical, lyrical even, demonstrating how far she’s moved on from those early days of simple bawling and how many novel vowel sounds are now available to her. Perhaps she is tasting and simultaneously creating sounds for it, experimenting with the whole sensory process of naming and describing. Or does she want to emulate my IDS as it would sound after lexical filtering? There’s lots of research on the ways parents and offspring pick up and exchange sounds, their willingness to entertain and connect through voice and eye contact. When the brains of both adult and infant are tested as they interact, they show an incredibly sensitive neural dynamic going on. So attuned are we that even the smallest signal in the baby’s prefrontal cortex can motivate something similar in the parent’s, our voices rising or lowering accordingly. They must be giving the teeniest suggestion of a smile, or a dilation of their pupils in order to motivate the extraordinary noises we grown-ups feel compelled to make.

Listening back to my video recording, I can hear how very conversational the whole thing is. I’m leaving pauses for Ellie to respond, the way I would in grown-up verbal dialogue. A linguist specializing in ‘discourse analysis’ would be able to analyse all the rhythmic and melodic shapes of conversation as she will one day experience them, as well as pointing out what I have learnt from my daughter.

I know, for example, that my nickname for her, Bibble, has been inspired by the gentle plosive sounds that she makes by smacking her lips together. It must also have something to do with the onomatopoeic word ‘baby babble’ we use to describe that sensory baby world where tasting and singing are one and the same. Her favourite TV programme, Teletubbies, is the best example I know of this sort of thing, its babble being the root of its success as entertainment for babies.

One intonation pattern stands out: the way Ellie starts high and then lets her voice descend before beginning another phrase. It sounds suspiciously like the opening phrases of ‘Summertime’. But then I remember this is the most common pitch pattern: when we launch a statement, the breath is strong and the voice high; gradually the pressure decreases and so does the pitch. Which means that in the variable context of our chit-chat, humans learn to associate high sounds with ideas like beginnings and innovation, and low ones with endings and boring stuff. By emulating a modulation like this, Ellie sounds very much as though she is using her vocal skill to communicate concepts.

Animals and birds do the same. Perhaps not those clever terriers on YouTube barking out ‘I love you!’, but certainly my averagely intelligent whippet who knows how to use a high whine for pleading and a low growl as warning. By applying a careful, musical ear (and plenty of recording technology) biologists are starting to discover more and more about the way animals communicate concepts with their voices. They are becoming familiar with the precise tones used by squirrels in calling out danger alarms, and the different ways frogs sing about the weather. With birds, they are discovering an ever-wider variety of song patterns used to assert territorial rites (like humans, bird accents are not all the same; they too exhibit regional differences).

Here is Ellie on-screen again soon after her first birthday, up on her feet and tottering about the house. With the major bipedal milestone achieved, she is now refining her vocal palate: one multi-purpose word standing in for whatever she requires. ‘Da!’ she demands, her voice authoritatively low, her forefinger pointing at the trolley of bricks she wants to push around the room. ‘Da – da!’ again for the toy she’d like me to please place in the trolley, this time making sure her voice has a cuter, interrogative lilt. Then a high, bright ‘Da, dada-da-da!’ for the tube of bubbles on the mantelpiece which I must blow for her. Such versatility that one syllable has. With her tongue tip against her hard palate she is stopping the air for a moment before letting it burst out in her most open vowel: the ‘ah’ sound that one day a doctor will ask her to use, because it sends her tongue right to the bottom of her mouth, offering him a fine view of her tonsils. Ellie’s pointing forefinger does the work of a noun, signalling what she’s communicating about, and the ‘da’s’ do the rest.

Interestingly, Darwin also had a baby who did this sort of thing, their chosen syllable being ‘Mum’ (like the great scientist, I am far too cool-headed to worry about whether it had anything to do with parental preference). He was struck by the range of pitch his child used in order to create meaning with a single syllable, and came to the conclusion that ‘before man used articulate language, he uttered notes in a true musical scale’. What Darwin was doing was integrating his observations about human development with theories about evolution: seeing his child as some sort of fast-forwarded illustration of how our species evolved over generations. Paralleling the two things in this way is one of the most hotly debated scientific topics: evolutionary, developmental biology or ‘evo-devo’ for short.

Personally, I find the linking of developmental stages with evolution compelling. I particularly like the idea that in both, singing comes first. And I’m not the only one. A whole century before Darwin the great biologist, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the great philosopher, came to the same conclusion not through evo-devo but by considering the origins of language. From his philosophical musings, he decided that early humans had chanted rather than chatted, their communications being more emotional than rational. He also proposed that word-based language had evolved in warm southern climes and later migrated northwards.

Modern-day archaeologists agree. They estimate it began in Africa around fifty thousand years ago. This is the period in prehistory when our ancestors started ritually burying their dead, and filling their graves with pots and jewellery and all sorts of stuff that archaeologists would later come to unearth. They also began to draw animal shapes on the walls of caves. The reason we now think this sort of activity coincided with the origins of words is to do with representing things in symbolic form. Those artefacts and pictures are evidence that our ancestors’ brains had become able to interpret and reconfigure the world around them. This is also the period when the earliest known musical instrument appears: a little flute made from the hollow bone of a cave bear, discovered in Slovenia. If the hominid brain could create a tool with which to replicate birdsong, then it could also select symbolic vocal sounds with which to denote all sorts of things in the world around them. And also, rather more importantly, the world that was not around them. Words are the specific sounds Ellie needs to use if she wants to talk about her toys when they’re not right there in front of her.

I have always told Ellie that her first word was ‘star’, as she jabbed at an Eric Carle cartoon on TV about a girl whose father builds her a ladder to the moon. I reckoned ‘star!’ was what she was saying. But now I’ve looked at the video again, and seen how her ‘da’ trick worked, it occurs to me that she was simply utilizing a multi-purpose syllable, making do just fine without word symbols. It is hard for us to imagine a world without words, but if you subscribe to evo-devo then infants are one way in. Previous to the brain development that allowed humans to name things, they could still talk about them by indicating; getting attention from one another with a single syllable (take your pick, ‘da’ or ‘Mum’). Or they might have mimicked the sound, as Ellie did when she took to emulating the sheep in the field behind our house. ‘Ba ba!’ she would cry, and ‘ba ba’ I would respond, letting her know her made-up word was a good one, and I understood. The main thing was to apply expressive musical contours to the syllables, like tuneful babble. By doing so, a word-free language was sufficient to transmit all the emotions and concepts they required. In other words, the Teletubbies’ vocal style is a remnant of the way our ancestors successfully communicated for millions of years: songs without words, or what singers sometimes call ‘vocalize’.

It is possible Ellie never discovered the word ‘star’ at all; it’s just that I thought she had. My mind chose that particular moment to make sense of her syllable, and my enthusiasm made her realize it was something significant and worth repeating. I can imagine denotative language evolving like this, because someone with extra brain connections, circa 48,000 BC, heard something in what was said. Of course, it was hugely significant. Not least because it meant ancient Homo sapiens could leave home. No longer did she need to hang around pointing at things; she had sounds for ‘trolley’ or ‘bubbles’ conveniently available on the tip of her tongue. She’d already been practising her two-legged running skills for a couple of million years; now was her chance to really test them out. So off she ran, carrying verbal language out of Africa to other continents and other tribes.

It wasn’t long before she encountered creatures quite like herself who had not yet made the verbal shift. In Europe, the Neanderthals had been getting along just fine with their version of vocalize, their intoned ‘da’s’ and ‘Mums’. As professor of archaeology at Reading University Steven Mithen so vividly describes in his book, The Singing Neanderthals, their culture had remained amazingly stable for hundreds of thousands of years, despite huge challenges like the Ice Age. This was quite possibly because their means of communication didn’t compel them to go anywhere. Whatever they wanted to discuss was right there in front of them. Imagine their happy babble taking place in tight communities, entirely present and feeling-full. Imagine conversations carefully undertaken through abstract sound, perhaps sharing a common tempo and a common key: a fluent process of listening and exchanging ideas musically that was the root of their strong cultural identity.

Though we don’t have any Neanderthal larynxes around to prove this, we do have their fossilized skulls, and by measuring them, prehistorians can get a good idea of how much vocal activity they were up to. All primates have a canal at the base of the skull, which carries the nerves concerned with the tongue’s movements, and another for those controlling chest-wall muscles: in other words, one for articulation and one for respiration. Modern humans have much larger nerve canals than apes or monkeys, which is another reason why we are so much better at singing than they are. And so did the earliest hominids: the holes in their fossilized heads are almost indistinguishable from ours. Recently, CT scans of Neanderthal skulls have also managed to create virtual reconstructions of their external and middle ear cavities, showing their hearing ability was also comparable.

Sadly, although the singing Neanderthals could hear every word that Homo sapiens uttered, their conceptual limitations made them vulnerable. They were fine comprehending the foreigner’s range of emotions and even their concepts, but they couldn’t get their heads around the words. Europe was experiencing nothing less than a Cognitive Revolution, and its natives just didn’t have the means to cope. Incidentally, it is possible that the invaders also had better voices. Both species shared the same low larynx and big nerve canals, but the northerners’ noses were squashed as an adaptive trait for their cold climate. And flat noses mean less resonance. Like as not, the migrant from the warm south would have won prehistoric X Factor as well as Scrabble. Most significantly, with her verbal dexterity Homo sapiens was able to be strategic, to plan and explain and also to dissemble. Soon enough, she had managed to wipe out all competitors and become the sole hominid on the planet.

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In our singing babies we witness what might have been, had words not conquered the world. And there is no better indicator of this than their gift of absolute pitch (otherwise known as ‘perfect pitch’): the ability to perceive the frequency of a sound, just as they would a colour; they may not be able to name it, but they can recognize it. This is different from the ability to hear how one tone relates to another: something called ‘relative pitch’ which is how we find our way through the contours of a tune when we sing it, relating one note to the next. It’s a skill many of us take for granted when we sing the same melody in more than one key.

You may find it difficult to believe all babies have absolute pitch, given how rare it is in adults, but scientists can demonstrate the same ability in animals, giving certain sound frequencies to correlating experiences: like Pavlov’s dog associating a particular bell with the arrival of food. In test conditions, numerous different species will recognize specific notes, from bats to wolves, gerbils to starlings. So consistent is their pitch frequency memory that it is regarded as innate. Cognitive psychologist Jenny Saffran was one of the first to develop tests to measure whether human babies are the same. She played them a three-minute stream of bell-like sounds (something they would never have heard before), and then added in some new pitches. The babies could clearly recognize where the new notes had been inserted, but if the test was altered so they had to recognize cues by relative pitch, they couldn’t do it. Saffran concluded that the infants had acute sensitivity to sound frequency and could categorize it. When she asked their parents to perform the same tests, the situation was reversed: the adults could only recognize things from relative pitches.

Only 1 in 10,000 people retains absolute pitch into adulthood. And they tend to be the ones with a lot of musical stimulus in their upbringing. Those blind from birth seem to acquire it more easily than the rest of us, suggesting that the parts of their brain meant for visual categorizing get recruited for pitch detection instead. And also people who speak tonal languages like Mandarin where subtle variations in pitch differentiate one word from another. The number of musicians who have it is much larger than in the community at large, including Michael Jackson, Ella Fitzgerald and baby Ellie’s Christmas favourite, Mariah Carey. I don’t have it, but colleagues who do find it hard to comprehend my lack. They regard mine as an auditory version of colour blindness.

It does seem strange that the vast majority of us lose such a skill in early childhood, especially considering it is the period of our lives when we are attaining so many. But this is no coincidence. The pitch sensitivity Ellie had when she was born enabled her to learn the subtle tonality of human communication. Once she had acquired its overarching musical flow, her task was then to slot in the vocab, syllable by syllable, beat by beat. For this, her brain needed to shift focus, making use of its powers of imitation and retention for the wordsmithery demanded by her Homo sapiens genes (as well as her eager parents). By the time she leaves school, she will have mastered roughly sixty thousand words; that’s a phenomenal rate of one new word every two hours for fifteen years.

For such a mighty task, her brain needs all the space it can get. And pitch sensitivity is something it can afford to jettison. Indeed, if she were to keep hold of it, it could prove a hindrance: for example, the same word uttered by a man and a woman would sound completely different because of the vast difference in the pitch of their voices. Such lack of versatility is exactly what can happen in adult musicians: if my colleagues with absolute pitch are asked to sing a piece in a different key from the original, they find it horribly confusing, as if an artist midway through a red painting were suddenly told it’s become a green one.

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