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Thursday, July 5, 2007

Music or language?

Mozhiyaa isaiyaa?Music or words? What came first?

I was taken by surprise when my chitti's 15 day old infant recognized me humming for him and went for a pleasant nap.Ofcourse one need not be a child psychologist to know that babies find comfort in a lulluby.Its not strange that bablies learn to voice-tune and recognize melody much before they learn to talk.Does this come to say music came before language?

A child learns the language only on repeated conversations, but it always has special ears for music.Science has proven that everyone is born with a nascent understanding and response to patterned sound-MUSIC. It is said that a baby ,even as a fetus would observe the pitch, rythm, spacing and mictrotones of the mother's voice.That is precisely the reason, the child exhibits a natural drive towards the mother's tongue as soon as it is born.The pitch, rythm .... are the musical contents of speech and these are captured by the baby, but not the words which form the language.

Can I now make a statment that music came before language?Or is it just that music is understood more easily by brain than words?For time being, let me say "Language came after music" :)