Commentary: The ‘Musilanguage’ Model of Language Evolution

The model of musilanguage (Brown, 2000, 2017) requires a new musicological term to refer to its texture. Like choral singing, and unlike speech, musilanguage is based on simultaneous vocalization of multiple participants who reproduce the same signal (call) at random time intervals and pitch levels, akin to a wolf “chorus.1” Voiced utterances produce multiple pitches, generating a “jumbled” texture, similar to polyphony and heterophony, but not fully qualifying as such. The term “heterophony” was introduced by Stumpf (1897) to refer to the fusion of sounds whose components retained their singular identity. Stumpf discovered this word in Plato’s Laws (Plato, 2013, p. 203), where it referred to pitch and rhythm discrepancy between the vocals and the lyre performing the same tune. Four years later, Stumpf (1901) reused this term to describe Thai music. He characterized heterophony as the looping of simultaneous melodic paraphrases [Umspielen], where parts generally followed the same melodic contour while differing in detail, so that minute discrepancies would meet again in unison. Adler (1908) conceptualized heterophony as a style alternative to homophony and polyphony, applicable across Siamese, Japanese, Javanese, and Russian musics. He specifically found Russian heterophony to present a paradigm of heterophonic arrangement, designed to make melodic repetition less monotonous and more idiosyncratic for each singer’s voice. The Russian Musical Encyclopedia defines heterophony as a multi-part music generated by the collective performance of the same melody, where parts contain deviations from the principal melodic formula (Mueller, 1973). Such organization is regarded as a general textural type of ornamental, harmonic, and/or polyphonic variation that can complicate classification. Indeed, already in 1911, Stumpf criticized Adler for misapplication of the term (Stumpf and David, 2012). The keynote of heterophony is an ongoing melodic repetition with numerous intermittent variations, which seems to apply to musilanguage chorusing (Brown, 2007). However, such chorusing contains no synchronization, whereas heterophony implies prevalent synchronization of parts. Swan (1943) defined heterophony as “a principal melody improvised simultaneously by several singers, retaining its main outline in each voice, yet showing enough independence to result in places in 2and 3and even 4-part harmony2.” The Grove Dictionary (Cooke, 2001), following Swan’s definition, emphasizes a collective synchronized execution. Although the notation example provided in the Grove article shows a consistent misalignment of 5 parts