Charles Limb, an otolaryngological surgeon at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, has reason to believe that the human auditory system was meant for greater things than understanding language and speech. For Limb, language is nothing but “a happy byproduct” of our true aural capacity.
Were we meant for more than just speech?
Language, for many scientists, is what makes us human. It’s what separates us from the animal kingdom and what allows us to master heightened forms of communication and interaction.
Despite the centuries of research which support this theory, Limb believes that the human ability to process more complicated acoustic systems, such as those that we find in music, might mean that the human brain was actually designed to listen to music – an aural activity which he considers to be far more refined than that of processing speech/language.
The human capacity to learn a musical instrument, respond to music and use music as a means of communication, are all reflective of the incredibly refined cerebral system that we have at our disposal. Communicating via speech and language is not nearly half as difficult for our complex brains to achieve when compared with the nuances of musical communication.
What do improvised jazz and language have in common?
In improvised jazz, the musicians communicate just like a group of people do when taking part in a conversation. You can hear statements, responses, questions, chatter which overlaps other chatter and general moods which are then disrupted by unexpected tangents, which take everything off into a new direction.
Jazz improvisations, “take root in the brain as a language,” Limb says, just like conversations we have through ordinary speech. The difference perhaps is that it takes a lot longer for the musician to get to the point where he or she is comfortable enough with the language of jazz to be able to improvise and “converse” through music with the same ease and confidence that he or she would do through ordinary speech.
What’s clear from Limb’s studies is that the language of jazz, just like speech, is based on a series of syntactic rules that all musicians subconsciously abide by. The music of jazz might be “heard” and “understood” without the need for semantic sense, but the syntax of language in jazz is most definitely in place. This is why Limb believes that humans utilize the same areas of the brain when listening to and playing music as they do when using speech to communicate with each other.
Indeed, with improvised jazz (with any music) the idea is to find beauty in the sounds shared. Jazz improvisations demand that the musicians find beauty in the sounds they create, but the meaning of the sounds isn’t important. When we communicate through languages, the semantic quality of what we say is just as important as the syntax. In music, the only thing the ear searches for is beauty. Our aural sense when tuned into to music is much more refined, much more sensual and natural than it is when we use it to communicate through speech.
In a sense, listening to music is the fine arts experience of human aural activity. Language communication is nothing short of cheap, fast-food for the ear.
Beethoven – a final thought
Taking Limb’s investigations to the next level, a quick look at Beethoven is particularly worthwhile. If Beethoven continued to write music long after he went completely deaf, perhaps our capacity to feel and process music is in fact the true purpose of our auricular abilities.
Beethoven couldn’t hear what people said to him, he became deaf to language but never to music. His capacity to “hear” and create music continued to function.
