Insights From Animals

Peter Marler
"Origins of Music and Speech: Insights from Animals"
in Wallin, Merker and Brown, eds.,
The Origins of Music (2000)

[32] Some fifteen years or so ago, the thinking of zoologists about the semantics of calls of animals, especially the vocalizations of monkeys and apes, underwent something of a revolution. Not long ago, speculations about how best to interpret animal calls were all based on what Donald Griffin (1992) aptly described as the "groans of pain" (GOP) concept of animal communication. This approach assumed that vocalizations of monkeys and other animals are displays of emotion or affect, much like our own facial expressions. Only humans are thought to have progressed beyond this condition and to have achieved symbolic signaling. Premack (1975) stated the prevailing view clearly and succinctly: "Man has both affective and symbolic communication. All other species, except when tutored by man, have only the affective form." Symbolic signals are taken to be those that have identifiable referents that the signal can be said to connote in an abstract, noniconic fashion. For an animal communication system to qualify as symbolic, information about one or more referents has to be both encoded noniconically by signalers and decoded in equivalent form by receivers.

Note that this is not a discussion about whether animal signals are meaningful or meaningless. Both affective and symbolic animal signals are meaningful and are often rich in information content; both serve important and diverse functions, some communicative to other individuals, some with repercussions for the physiological and mental states of the signaler. At issue here is not the presence of meaning but the kind of meaning that affective and symbolic signals convey. This is a complex subject with many dimensions. Some view the contrasts as differences in degree rather than kind. In some circumstances signals traditionally thought of as affective, such as human facial expressions, can assume a symbolic function. Complex signals may contain within them intimately blended components in which the balance between affective and symbolic content can vary dramatically from one the another. Speech is an obvious case. Anonymous computerized speech, lacking individual iden-
[33]
tity, gender, and emotion, is a sadly impoverished vehicle for social communication. We must not fall into the trap of assuming that signal systems that are not languagelike are necessarily impoverished as vehicles for social communication.

If you say so. But to apply the encoding-decoding criterion outside the realm of language seems merely to establish quite the impoverished conception of social communication.

p. 36:
Phonological Syntax

Recombinations of sound components (e.g. phonemes) in different sequences (e.g. words), where the components themselves are not meaningful. I call this "phonocoding."

Lexical Syntax

Recombinations of component sequences (e.g. words in the lexicon) into different strings (sentences). Here there is meaning at two levels, the word and the sentence. The meaning of the string is a product of the assembled meanings of its components. I call this "lexicoding."

Peter Cariani
"Life’s journey through the semiosphere"

Hoffmeyer follows the contemporary tendency to think of sensory systems as being highly specialized for particular ecological niches, and hence to interpret Uexküll’s umwelts as mostly incommensurable perspectives. However, despite the spectacular adaptations that are sometimes observed (e.g. the sonar of the bat), these particular sensory enhancements are invariably built out of ancient body-designs that have been conserved over huge phylogenetic spans. The same evolutionary conservatism may hold for the neural coding strategies that are used in representing and processing sensory information. While the particular experiential textures of things, their qualia, undoubtedly vary across different vertebrates, the basic body-plans, sensory organs and neural representations are roughly similar. We may see in different colors, hear in different frequency registers, and smell different odors, but the basic relational organizations of our percept-spaces in the end may not be so radically different. Birdcalls are almost certainly interpreted by other birds in a manner that is very different from how we interpret them, but there is enough commonality to what we hear to enable us to imitate birdcalls well enough to fool the birds themselves. The same goes for birds listening to and imitating human speech. Such cross-species invariants are not possible without general-purpose sensory and effector mechanisms for both analyzing and producing wide ranges of sounds. It is thus possible for more generalist evolutionary solutions to prevail, especially in the realm of the senses, where appearances change rapidly. For predator and prey alike, one needs general purpose sensory systems that reliably recognize other animals under widely varying conditions.

Heigh Ho, Pomo

Gerald Graff
"The Myth of Postmodern Breakthrough" (orig. 1979)
in Critical Essays on American Postmodernism (1994)
ed. Stanley Trachtenberg
pp. 69-80

In an essay that asks the question, "What Was Modernism?" Harry Levin identifies the "ultimate quality" pervading the work of the moderns as "its uncompromising intellectuality." The conventions of postmodern art systematically invert this modernist intellectuality by parodying its respect for truth and significance. ... It appears that the term "meaning" itself, as applied not only to art but to more general experience, has joined "truth" and "reality" in the class of words which can no longer be written unless apologized for by inverted commas.

Thus it is tempting to agree with Leslie Fiedler's conclusion that "the Culture Religion of Modernism" is now dead. The most advanced art and criticism of the last twenty years seem to have abandoned the modernist respect for artistic meaning. The religion of art has been "demythologized." A number of considerations, however, render this statement of the case misleading. Examined more closely, both the modernist faith in literary meanings and the postmodern repudiation of these meanings prove to be highly ambivalent attitudes, much closer to one another than may at first appear. The equation of modernism with "uncompromising intellectuality" overlooks how much of this intellectuality devoted itself to calling its own authority into question. . . .

(pp. 70-71)

With no scruples whatseover about repeating myself, I must say that following my trip to art school the ultimate archetype of these "highly ambivalent attitudes" and of the "deliberate avoidance of interpretability ha[ving] moved from the arts into styles of personal behavior" (71) will always be, for me, the radical conceptual art grad student who drives a gas-guzzling motor vehicle and listens exclusively to top-40 radio.

My unconsidered gut reaction to Graff's final sentence above is that "modernist" musicians tended more towards reasserting/recovering/recreating some lost "authority" and were usually not too interested in questioning themselves. Also that the principals of the eventual postmodern backlash are quite comfortable slipping into the tattered robes of "authority" whenever they think they can get away with it. Hence this whole question of exposing shams of undue authority is what inclines me toward a positive self-identification as a "postmodernist." I can't really say so in casual conversation, however, because there are too many other associations with the term which don't fit me at all.

Conspicuous among them: I do believe that rational, just authority exists. It's just that, in music, I am typically most skeptical about its possibility on the level of "meaning;" and yes, those scare-quotes are so totally necessary anytime that warhorse word is trotted out of the stable.

signals have meanings but stimuli need not

from
A PSYCHOLOGICAL INVESTIGATION
OF THE CONTENT OF MUSIC
Roger J. Watt and Roisin L. Ash
4th European Conference on Philosophy and Psychology, 1996

Meaning

The meaning of a signal

is

the intended and agreed mental action
of that signal.

Meaning
is bound up with
communication


, so that

signals have meanings

, but

stimuli need not

.

The meaning of a signal is
not just the action of that signal
:

meaning is reserved

for cases where

the action is intended

.

It would not make

much sense to allow

the sender

to

claim some meaning

to a signal

when

no recipient would be

aware

of that meaning

, and so

meaning is restricted

to cases where

the recipient

and

the sender

have

agreed

what the intended action should be
.

None of the actions of music
considered above,
per se,
would indicate that music has meaning
:

music does not mean tapping feet just because it has that action
;

music does not mean a cup of coffee
in Lochinver because that is what it is
associated with for some listeners
;

music does not mean the sea because that is what it is taken to express by
some listeners
or what it was intended to express by
the composer
.