Beatboxing, pre-linguistic communication in early humans, and the implications of social bonding for the modern era

In the definitive beatboxing documentary series We Speak Music, neuroscientist and TED lecturer Dr. Sophie Scott stated that “Beatboxing is giving us some glimpse into this use of the human voice that might well have been something that pre-dated language”.

In her lecture at Wired 2015 symposium, Dr. Scott elaborated on this concept and showed functional brain imaging data suggesting that beatboxing may rely on more evolutionarily-conserved brain circuitry than does speech. Unlike lyrical singing, which utilizes the voice as a (poetic and) melodic instrument, beatboxing specifically utilizes the voice as a rhythmic instrument, and this requires more attention to tempo, relative volume for pattern emphasis, syncopation, and motor control of “articulator” muscles.

These observations by Dr. Sophie Scott might seem merely intriguing at first. However, given the increasingly divided state of human civilization, a modern Renaissance of a “universal [proto-] language”—closely resembling that shared by some of our earliest common ancestors—i.e. beatboxing, becomes far more culturally significant.

To understand these ideas more clearly, it helps to frame them in the context of prior theories and evidence derived from the fields of evolutionary biology, anthropology, and archaeology. Consider the following.

1) Authors Ma and Johnson remind us of Darwin’s original hypothesis that “speech and music originated from a common emotional signal system based on the imitation and modification of sounds in the environment”.

2) Just as beatboxers mimic percussive samples from drum machines like the Roland 808, Lemaitre et al describe in detail the human capacity to vocally imitate non-vocal sounds. This ability might not require activation of the modern receptive/expressive linguistic regions of the brain, but it could certainly prove evolutionary advantageous if it facilitated consensus signaling for the location(s) of food, water, predators, etc.

3) Dr. Matz Larsson has described how the Incidental Sounds Of [bipedal] Locomotion and early Tool Use-associated Sounds may have also “stimulated the evolution of musical abilities, auditory working memory, and abilities to produce complex vocalizations and to mimic natural sounds”. Certain rhythmic patterns can permanently imprint themselves into human brains the first time they are heard—Like the simplistic-yet-iconic repeating kick-kick-clap intro to Queen’s “We will rock you”, or the far more sophisticated and ubiquitous “Amen Break”.

4) Dr. Anton Killin writes “The last million years or so saw a significant increase in hominin encephalization…which…enabled vocal-anatomic and neural co-evolution, selecting for the ontogenetically lowering [larynxes] of humans as our ancestors became ever more verbally communicative…Lower [larynxes] extend the resonance chamber formed by the throat and mouth, which greatly increases vocal ranges and the sounds producible…the first evidence for this occurring is in Homo ergaster/erectus…Likewise, co-evolution fine-tuned the neural and anatomic mechanisms underlying auditory perception, especially with respect to hearing hominin voices…Whether Neanderthals, also descendants of H. heidelbergensis, had anything like early H. sapiens’ linguistic-vocal capacities is hotly debated…Nonetheless, Mithen argues that Neanderthals may have been more musical than other researchers have supposed”.

5) Enter Dr. Steven Mithen’s book, The Singing Neanderthals: In this text, he argues that ”musicality is a fundamental part of being human, that this capacity is of great antiquity, and that a holistic protolanguage of musical emotive expression predates language and was an essential precursor to it”:

(“Hmmm” is Mithen’s acronym for his posited common ancestor of music and language, which stands for “Holistic, manipulative, multi-modal, musical, and mimetic”).

6) Building on the above ideas, Dr. Nathan Oesch applies a compelling theory about rhythmic vocalization and the social bonding hypothesis: “The frequent difference between the synchrony of music and antiphony in spoken language raises critical questions for hypotheses proposing a similar origin for these domains based in social bonding. Namely, did the presumed ancestral musilanguage consist of continuous, synchronous beats? If so, why has this aspect been lost in modern speech? If not, why has this feature emerged in music? Stated more technically, what fitness advantage might there have been, during human evolution, to add a steady beat to a song vocalization or to music in general? In other words, if non-rhythmic animal song is enough for bonding non-human animals, why does human song and song-infused music generally have a rhythmic, steady beat? Although this first issue is hard to answer definitively, hints to the latter four queries, as has been noted, may come from taking into account the social context where continuous temporal patterns often happen. Namely, once a group has been formed, via the bonding influence of language, music, or song, a very plausible hypothesis is that the introduction of rhythm allows a group to synchronize this same song or music to an external time-piece, enhancing the perception of internal group cohesion, and conveying an honest signal of external group cohesion to predators or rival human groups”.

So in conclusion, if rhythmic vocalization evolved as a means of pre-linguistic communication to promote social bonding among some of our earliest shared ancestors (e.g. the primal soothing effect of a mother’s familiar voice to a crying infant in any culture in human history), then the potential of beatboxing to heal social division seems worth exploring perhaps now more than ever.

This was of course a central premise of #departurethealbum and the forthcoming documentary, Urban Beats & Ancient Melodies: The Stereognosis Story. Likewise, the combined formula of beatboxing (+ breakdance + street art ) + traditional strings and percussion from the Horn of Africa and the Levantine Corridor was hardly a coincidence. Our focus on the Cradle of Civilization forms the next chapter of the Stereognosis blog (stay tuned).