Season 5: Episode 13

Part of the Choir

Homo sapiens joined the story of life on Earth just 300,00 years ago.  So when and how did we start making music and creating languages? In this episode, we explore these signature sounds and discover how they are rooted in listening.

Guests

Aidan Hughes

Aidan is a consultant archaeologist, working in the management of cultural heritage in Queensland, Australia, and with Indigenous groups to help protect their heritage. He has a strong interest in stone tool analysis and creation, bringing a hands-on, practical approach to archaeological investigations with a passion for creating a physical connection with the past.

Dr. Jon Hurty

Dr. Jon Hurty is Director of Choral Activities and Henry Veld Professor in Music at Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois. He directs the Augustana Choir, Chamber Singers, Oratorio Society, and the Augustana Choral Artists. He also teaches choral conducting.

Jayne Wilkins

Jayne Wilkins is a palaeoarchaeologist and ARC Discovery Early Career Research Fellow at the Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution, Griffith University.

Michelle Langley

Michelle C. Langley is an Associate Professor of Archaeology in the Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution (ARCHE) at Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia. She is the author of 'A Record in Bone. Exploring Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Bone and Tooth Objects' (2023, Aboriginal Studies Press) and has been involved in unveiling some of the earliest ornaments, bone tools, and shell artefacts discovered throughout the Australian and Southeast Asian regions.

Sarah Wurz

Sarah Wurz is a Professor of Archaeology at the School of Geography, Archaeology and Environmental Studies, University of the Witwatersrand and she is affiliated with the Centre of Excellence on Early Sapience Behaviour at the University of Bergen. She is currently the director of excavations and research at Klasies River main site situated on the Tsitsikamma coast, a key site for understanding the origins of modern humans or Homo sapiens.

The Augustana Choir

The Augustana choir, from Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois, has established a tradition of excellence in singing a cappella choral literature from the Renaissance through present day. The highly select ensemble, consisting of 52 singers from all areas of study at Augustana, is known for its expressive and innovative approach to choral performance. Jon Hurty has directed the ensemble since 1996.

Credits

Transcript

[00:00] INTRODUCTION

AMY: It's three hundred thousand years ago, and you're out by a stream, digging for roots.

STREAM

AMY: Your baby is sleeping on your back. Your other kids are back at the cave with the rest of your group. It's hot. You put down your digging stick for a moment, cup your hands in the stream, and drink. When suddenly, you hear something.

HUMAN VOICE CALLING

AMY: A voice. Some kind of creature making a sound you've never heard before.

HUMAN VOICE CALLING

AMY: You hide in the bushes and listen. Whatever it is, it's getting closer.

HUMAN VOICE CALLING

AMY: And even though the voice is unfamiliar, and the sounds it's making are new, there's something instantly recognizable about it, too. You know what kind of animal this is. The same kind you are. A human being.

HUMAN VOICE CALLING

AMY: Welcome to Threshold, I'm Amy Martin, and after twelve episodes, we have finally arrived at the emergence of our own species, Homo sapiens. Our early history seems like a long time ago to us now, but we’re actually very recent additions to the story of life on Earth. Microbes have been around for at least three-and-a-half billion years. Fish, 480 million years or so. Dinosaurs showed up around 230 million years ago. The first elephants about eight million years ago. And us humans? We are the first animal we're meeting this season whose time on Earth is counted not in billions or millions of years, but thousands.

SARAH: Archaic Homo sapiens evolved into Homo sapiens around we think now 300,000 years ago.

AMY: It just makes us sound so young as a species. It's like nothing!

SARAH: It's like nothing!

AMY: Sarah Wurz is an archaeologist based in South Africa. I reached out to her because I wanted to know what the world might have sounded like to the first humans. And how we sounded to each other.

SARAH: So through genetic analysis, we can see that possibly the whole of Africa had small groups of anatomically modern humans that must have interacted.

AMY: Sarah says that although it’s clear we evolved in Africa, there's no single location we can point to and say definitively: this is where our species began. But we do know that early humans lived in small groups that mixed and mingled with each other. 

SARAH: So if you imagine a landscape in which there are small groups that are connected, they would have had to communicate with each other and there are various ways to do that.

AMY: They might have clapped. Banged sticks together. Shouted, hummed, sang out.

SARAH: I’m almost sure they would have had calls.

AMY: And eventually, we also started to do this:

CACOPHONY OF TALKING

AMY: And this:

CACOPHONY OF MUSIC

AMY: Our distant ancestors did not have music or language. And now, somehow, we do. How did that transformation happen? And when? And why? There are no conclusive answers to these questions, only educated guesses, and we’re going to ponder some of them in this episode. One thing we can say for sure though is that humans emerged into a world filled with the voices of other creatures, and the sounds of our places. And just like all the other beings we’ve met this season, we wouldn’t be here today if we hadn’t listened carefully to our surroundings. It was in this context of attunement that our ancestors somehow began to speak and make music together. And we sang and drummed and talked with each for a very long time before we began translating these sonic experiences into written characters, alphabets, and systems of musical notation. In other words, these two signature human skills of music and language—things we often think of as expressive abilities—are deeply rooted in listening. 

THEME MUSIC

[05:10 ] A SEGMENT

SOUNDS OF FLINTKNAPPING

AMY: It's a lovely May morning in Brisbane, Australia. I'm sitting on the edge of a sandbox on the campus of Griffith University.

AMY: I just think it's so cool that a university campus has a giant sandbox.

JAYNE: There's actually two. There's that one too.

AMY: Archaeologist Jayne Wilkins has agreed to meet me here with her fellow archaeologist Michelle Langley and honors student Aidan Hughes. Together, we're going to try to recreate one important part of the soundscape of an early human community: the sounds of people making stone tools.

AIDAN: Jokingly I refer to it as like banging rocks.

AMY: Aidan tells me he’s going to make a hand axe—kind of like a rounded stone knife. He shows me the two kinds of rocks he'll be using.

AIDAN: So you get what you call a hammer stone, and then you get your nodule or your core, hit one with the other, and it breaks off what they call a flake.

AMY: The core is the bigger piece, the part that will become the axe. But the flakes—the thin little pieces that fly off as he works the stone—can also be used as tools.

JAYNE: They have really sharp edges, so this is a bit of a warning, Amy. If you do touch anything here, they're really, really sharp, a lot sharper than you think they would be. I actually cut my finger this morning just getting this stuff ready.

AMY: That sharpness is, of course, the goal here.

MICHELLE: If you ever watch the survivalist shows, the people who take a knife in with them, that's what you need.

AMY: That's Michelle Langley and she says when we think of stone knives, our minds often go immediately to hunting and butchering animals. And of course, those were important uses. But there were many others.

MICHELLE: I'm sure there was a lot of cutting up of fruits and vegetables and fibers, and just trying to get bits of wood to make fires once we were creating fires. So it's not all about meat, a knife is good for anything that you'd need to cut and scrape.

FLINTKNAPPING SOUNDS

AMY: I can imagine this being a really homey sound. This is so clearly a sound made made by your group, and maybe you're returning back and you hear this and it's like, oh, there they are.

JAYNE: Yeah, there'd be fire, so you'd hear the, like, crackling, crackling, crackling. You'd hear people talking, right, like little groups talking, and you hear all of that, plus this. Like, a couple people doing that. All the nature sounds too, you know, the animals that you know the birds that you know.

AMY: And these would have been familiar sounds not just for the relative newcomers, Homo sapiens, but for our predecessors as well.  

JAYNE: People started making stone tools three million years ago. And this is before our species, right? Before Homo sapiens. But it's even before our genus, so even before our genius, homo. It was Australopithecines.

AMY: The Australopithecines have become world famous through the skeleton of an adult female who lived over three million years ago in what we now call Ethiopia. She's known as Lucy in English and Dinknesh in Amharic, which means “you are marvelous.” She stood just over a meter tall, and mostly walked upright. Although we can't say for sure that Lucy herself created stone tools, her species probably did. And even before Australopithecus, Jayne says other primates were using stone tools.

JAYNE: Our nearest cousins, the great apes and chimpanzees for example, use tools and they use rocks as tools even, but they don't make those rocks into tools. So that's the difference, that three million years ago people started making stones into tools.

AMY: So by the time Homo sapiens emerged, these sounds of rocks hitting rocks and sharp flakes flying off had filled the air for millions of years.

FLINTKNAPPING SOUNDS

AMY: Aidan is hard at work, slowly shaving one side of the core down into a thin edge. But when I move in to take a closer look, I see the rock he's holding is smeared with blood. He's cut himself. But he says there is an upside.

AIDAN: You tend to get a better result when you bleed on the rock a little. (laughter)

AMY: Michelle, Jayne, and Aidan keep hammering away at their stones, and the sandbox starts to become littered with razor-like flakes.

CLUNK CLUNK

AMY: Watching them, it’s clear that there is a whole lot more involved here than just banging rocks together. It takes concentration and planning. To start with, you have to know which rocks to use. Not only which types of stone, but which particular chunks are likely to be better or worse to work with. Jayne says that some cores have invisible cracks in them, and advanced knappers try to sort those out so they don't waste time shaping them into tools, only to have them break.

JAYNE: Expert knappers hit their cores with their hammers so the hammers are these small round rocks. And based on the sounds, they can hear cracks.

AMY: An early flint knapper may have done a little bit of knocking around to learn like, oh, this is a good rock.

JAYNE: Yeah, for sure.

AMY: It sort of speaks to cultural learning, I imagine then. Like if you're the child of the flint knapper or just if you are in the group, you're learning from the adults on how to do it, right?

JAYNE: Yeah, absolutely. You're around adults all the time who are doing it, and you're eventually picking it up from them, and they're probably actively teaching you these things as well.

AMY: Aidan says that with experience, you get better at aiming your blows, and more efficiently shaping the core into the form you're trying to make. But sometimes no matter what you do, it doesn't quite work out, he says. The rock just refuses to break the way you want it to.

AIDAN: So you keep hitting it and it keeps not working and the problem gets worse and worse…

AMY: So sometimes you just have to give up, he says, and toss that stone aside. And when he's out excavating at a prehistoric site, Aidan says these artifacts of frustration from a fellow stone tool maker are some of his favorite things to find.

AIDAN: And you go out into the field, and you'll find a discarded core, and you're like, yeah, I've been there buddy. (laughter)

AMY: And that buddy could be like a hundred thousand years old.

AIDAN: Yeah, or more than that or whatever.

AMY: Yeah, that is very cool.

CLINK-SHATTER

JAYNE: That was a nice sound, a nice flake with sharp edges that you can use for a long time.

AMY: You can hear that, even if you hadn't been looking, you could have heard it.

JAYNE: Yeah, I would have heard that. And I've never thought about it before but, yeah just because of the topic of this podcast I'm like no if even if I wasn't watching I could have told you that was a flake coming off.

AMY: Uh-huh, interesting.

AMY: So there is definitely a sonic element to this.

AIDAN: There is definitely a sound. If you get it right it makes the nice like “ting” sound and it all goes together at once, if you don't, it makes various thudding sounds. A mate of mine was upstairs when we were at his place knapping, he was making a cuppa. And he comes down and he's like, that's really inefficient napping.

AMY From the sound of it.

AIDAN: From upstairs listening to the sound of it, he's like, that's clearly not working for you.

AMY: Was he right?

AIDAN: Yeah, of course he was right.

CLUNK-SHATTER

AIDAN: A flake came off that one, but that was less good.

CLUNK (sounds of approval)

AIDAN: That was good.

AMY: As I listen to Aidan work, I'm pretty amazed to think this was once one of the loudest sounds humans made. He tells me that he and a friend have started an informal club for folks who like to do flintknapping. I asked him what it sounds like when they get together.

AMY: Are you talking? Are you quiet?

AIDAN: Bit of both. You'll see sort of like at the start, you'll see like lots of talking, everyone's getting there settling in and then you'll talk and chat about different things. But then sometimes you'll just get that silence where people sort of focusing on what they're doing and then you might talk for a bit after that, or it'll like go quiet again, and just back and forth I guess.

AMY: Yeah.

AIDAN: Yeah.

MICHELLE: But this is where the flintknapping and language connection comes in, because they've worked out the same part of the brain has been used for both of these activities.

AMY: Michelle says researchers have actually wired up flint knappers so they can see what's happening in their brains in real time. And the parts of the brain that light up as the knappers work the rocks are the same ones that are used for conversation. So much so that most people struggle to do both things at once—they alternate between talking and knapping, just as Aidan described, and as he's doing with me.

MICHELLE: So there's some kind of connection in that the same area of your brain that we use for language is also used for making stone tools.

AMY: So there appears to be a correlation between stone tool-making and language, but causation, if there is any, remains a mystery. We don't know if the process of creating stone tools and the process of creating language happened separately or together, or what sort of feedback loops between the two might have been involved. For example, maybe stone tool-making slowly changed the brain in ways that made it more likely for language to evolve. Or maybe language allowed ancestral humans to develop and pass on new tool-making skills. Or both, at once. Of course, language isn't a requirement for teaching—we can learn a whole lot simply by watching someone demonstrate a task. But words can be very helpful. They sure were for me.

AIDAN: You're going to hit it there.

AMY: : Hit it..?

AIDAN: There. So…

AMY: I'm holding the core in one hand and the smaller hammer stone in the other. Michelle and Jayne are serving as documentarians temporarily. And Aidan is trying to help me make a good flake.

AIDAN: So you wanna hold it so that the force is going that way. If you're holding it that way, where's your force going? It's going there. So you're gonna go there.

AMY: Okay, so I want to hit it kind of right on.

AIDAN: Sort of into the rock. Into the rock. So sort of like that kind of thing.

JAYNE: And Amy, just mindful of your thumb…

AMY: OK.

AIDAN: Yeah, don't hit that.

JAYNE: ...that you're tucking it back.

AMY: Got it.

CLUNK CLUNK

AMY: My initial results were unimpressive.

AMY: Not a master knapper.

AIDAN: That's OK.

CLUNK CLUNK

AMY: Listening back to this now, I can hear that I was hitting the stone very weakly.

AIDAN: There's a knapper in the UK who says you've gotta talk quite forcefully to the rock.

AMY: OK, you listen to me, rock.

CLUNK CLUNK

AMY: Sounds better, but nothing's happening.

JAYNE: You know how they say in baseball, like, follow through?

AMY: Yeah, I suck at baseball. (laughter) That's why I became a journalist, because I'm no good at sports. I'll give it one more shot here.

CLUNK

ALL: Yeah, woohoo!

AMY: It was surprisingly satisfying to chip even one sharp flake off of this rock.

AMY: Everywhere that Homo sapiens went, we brought this technology with us, is that correct?

MICHELLE: Yes.

AMY: Siberia, into the Americas, everything.

MICHELLE: Everywhere.

AMY: It's that useful.

MICHELLE: Oh yeah.

AMY: It makes me really want to learn how to do it.

MICHELLE: I know, it's fun. I think it's good because it's problem-solving, you know, it's creative.

AMY: It's very creative.

MICHELLE: It's physical.

JAYNE: I mean, you can do it now, right? Like, you made some flakes. So if you're out in the woods and you're stuck there for days and you need a knife for something, you can make one.

AMY: A really bad one.

JAYNE: Well, you just need a flake.

MICHELLE: You just need a flake.

JAYNE: Even a little one, it's sharp.

MICHELLE: You can cut things.

JAYNE: You can do what you need to do.

FLINT KNAPPING SOUNDS

AMY: Jayne and Michelle have much greater confidence in me than I have in myself, but I do feel just a tiny bit more equipped to do this if I had to. And it helps me imagine how transformative it must have been when our ancestors started making tools like these. What a game-changer to not have to just rely on what you could find, but actually be able to create something that could be used to slice meat off the bone, chop up tough, fibrous roots, defend yourself from an attack, or cut up a hide to wrap around a vulnerable newborn.

AMY: This is the sound development. This is the sound of like, we can do more now.

JAYNE: Yeah, it's kind of like an industrial revolution, you know? It's like society changing. It's the sounds of that.

AMY: And that revolution wasn't only about what these new tools could do, but also about how the process of making them created contexts for new forms of collaboration and communication. This percussive, spacious activity may have been a natural gateway into music-making, or  language, or both.

MICHELLE: I've been on excavation teams in France and everyone has their little one by one meter square and we're all quietly digging away with small knives at this site, and it'd just be silent. And then after a while people start singing. So it's funny how you have the silence, but then music will start.

AMY: I think that's really important actually, because it's the moments of silence, the space in between that we absolutely don't have anymore, and how interesting that something arises out of that that wouldn't arise if all this space was filled.

MICHELLE: Yeah, yeah.

AMY: The sound of stone tool-making is like a magical thread connecting the present moment to a distant time. Or many other times. Lucy probably heard it, and may well have made it herself, three million years ago. And the very first members of our species would have too, three hundred thousand years ago. And here I am, sitting on a university campus in Australia, making it now.

We'll have more after this short break.

Break

[19:55] B SEGMENT

AMY: Welcome back to Threshold, I'm Amy Martin, and this is a morning newscast from Thailand.

THAI NEWSCAST

AMY: I don't speak Thai, so I am completely clueless about what information or ideas these two people might be sharing. But I do understand that the sounds they're making contain information and ideas. In other words, I know that these sounds are symbols for other things. I don't know what those symbols are, but I could learn.

THAI NEWSCAST

AMY: As humans, this is something we just take for granted. We know from experience that other members of our species make sounds that can be used as symbols. We call it language, and as normal as it seems to us now, it's pretty special.

SARAH: It's not something that happened overnight with a flick of a switch or with the addition of a new gene. It's not like that, it's a system that evolved over time.

AMY: This is Sarah Wurz.

SARAH: I'm a professor of archeology at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. So I teach archeology and I do research in archeology as well as in archeo-music and the evolution of music.

AMY: Sarah says one of the fascinating things about language is its collaborative nature—the way a random sound becomes a symbol for something else, not just in my mind, or yours, but in ours, together. 

SARAH: And a symbol is something that you use that has no natural referent in the outside world. So I call this a pen but there's no reason for calling it a pen. It's between us, it's a cultural name for something. 

AMY: Twins sometimes do this as children—they develop their own language that's often understandable only to them. In some ways, the languages that we all speak are just like that, but scaled up. 

SARAH: We use symbols between individuals. It's not an individual thing, it's a group thing. It's about communicating ideas within a group. So it needs to become a convention.

AMY: Learning a new language is essentially learning a new set of conventions. In English, we say food. In Spanish, comida. In Swedish, mat. In Thai, อาหาร (ah-hahn). I think. It takes time, and effort, but once language as a concept exists in your mind, it’s kind of just a game of filling in the blanks. It’s an entirely different endeavor to make the leap from having no language at all into a world of words and sentences. How do you kick off that process?

SARAH: How would you lay down that very first symbol in the brain?

AMY: Sarah says the simplest answer is that we don't know.

SARAH: It's all indirect evidence, there is not a smoking gun, you know, you have to put together your argument.

AMY: And there is a lot of argument. The question of how human language evolved is a great way to start a fight among archaeologists, biologists, anthropologists, and everybody else who thinks about this kind of stuff. But Sarah thinks that process may have begun with this:

SOUNDS OF WALKING

AMY: About a million years after Lucy's time, Homo erectus arrived on the scene. And it was a big deal.

SARAH: There seem to have been a watershed with the evolution of Homo erectus, two million years ago.

AMY: Sarah says Homo erectus had a body that were more similar to ours than anything that came before in multiple ways. But their signature difference, and what they're named for, is their ability to walk upright. Their predecessors also walked upright at least some of the time, but Homo erectus was fully bipedal. That gave them a very different experience of the world.

WALKING SOUNDS

AMY: Like us, Homo erectus had a relatively wide pelvis and long legs, which allowed them to walk—and run—further and faster. And if you’ve ever walked or run in a quiet place, you know that the sound of your feet hitting the Earth creates a strong rhythm. You can’t help but notice it. Homo erectus would have experienced this repetitive sound. And as they moved across the landscape in groups, they likely fell into synchronized rhythmic movement with each other. Like we do.

SARAH: So when you jog for example, people tend to synchronize their movements.

SOUND OF PEOPLE RUNNING TOGETHER

AMY: So what does all of this have to do with language?

SARAH: I think that the capability to walk on two legs habitually, and to run also, had a big influence in how your brain makes sense of signals. How you move influence how you make concepts.

SARAH: If you want to learn a concept, your neurons must fire together.

AMY: And one of the best ways to get neurons firing together is through rhythmic movement.

SARAH: So you needed a mnemonic and that is a memory aid for you to be able to create the first symbols. Through rhythmic movement you can repeat a concept enough so that you form a symbol in your mind.

SARAH: Children that have problems in learning language, for example, or to speak, what do they do? They teach those symbols or words with rhythmic movement. So I-will-go, for example.

STEADY RHYTHM

AMY: A rhythm. A beat. Internally, it gets our neurons firing together. And externally, it gets individuals moving together. And that could have delivered a lot of benefits to early humans. Picture yourself moving across the savannah in a small group when a lion suddenly appears. If everyone starts running in all directions, willy nilly, to the lion, you sound like what you are: a group of panicked animals. But if you manage to synchronize your movements, the vibes change dramatically.

SARAH: To the lion that you want to impress, you seem like one being, if you move together and you make sound together.

AMY: Moving together may have been an advantage when early humans were in the role of predator as well. It could have helped them flush prey animals out of a hiding spot, or herd them in a certain direction. Of course, we can't know for sure if Homo erectus synchronized their movements and created sounds together. But it's possible, and doing so might have helped them survive. And maybe that's why even today our bodies reward us when we move in time with each other, and make rhythms and sounds together.

SARAH: There's a whole host of hormones that get secreted when you do this, happy hormones. So there is a very bodily reaction to moving rhythmically that creates a situation of trust. You start trusting each other implicitly.

AMY: And trust is an extremely high-value commodity for social animals.

SARAH: We are group animals and actually to live in a group is really stressful. If you're a group of hominins that stay together, say you're more than 30, if we cannot create trust between individuals, it's a highly stressful situation. What do you do? How do you deal with the stress? How do you communicate inside the group and then also outside?

AMY: Music is a powerful way to bring a group together, build trust and relieve social stress. We sing and dance in celebration, in mourning, to thank and appease the gods, and to prepare for battle. Sarah says this pattern is repeated in culture after culture.

SARAH: Get together, sing, dance, clap, make sound, become one, and then do what you have to do.

MUSIC ENDS, CROWD CHEERS

SARAH: How this links then is that moving together rhythmically possibly by two million year ago, and I would say that might have created the ideal ground for starting thinking in symbols, starting trusting each other in a group in a certain way for a music language to develop.

AMY: So, way before Homo sapiens then.

SARAH: Yes, that is my contention, yeah.

AMY: The importance of group music-making is captured in images painted onto cave walls tens of thousands of years ago. People playing flutes and beating drums and dancing. And occasionally, archaeologists find instruments made of bone. But of course the sounds themselves are lost forever, along with the very first musical instruments—the bodies and breath of our ancestors.

SARAH: Our bodies are musical. We only need our body to make a rhythmic sound, stamp our feet, we can clap our hands...

AMY: And singing.

SARAH: Singing, absolutely.

SARAH: So for me, music really defines who we are. And I think if you want to help people, and if people want to be more happy, I guess, and being more connected, I think it's through making music together. It bonds people.

CHOIR WARMING UP

AMY: It's late afternoon on the campus of Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois, and the choir is warming up.

CHOIR WARMING UP

AMY: Around fifty students, standing in tiered rows, stretch out their voices under the direction of Dr. Jon Hurty.

CHOIR WARMING UP

AMY: I was in Augustana Choir myself when I was a student here, and like Sarah said, the experience was deeply bonding. I asked Dr. Hurty if I could come back for a visit to think with him and the students about what being a member of this kind of choir has to tell us about being a member of the whole planetary ensemble of living, singing things.

CHOIR WARMING UP: chord

AMY: He kindly said yes, and I dropped in on a rehearsal just three weeks into a new term, when the students were still getting to know the music, and each other.

CHOIR WARMING UP: chord

JON: Good!

AMY: After they've warmed up, they start working on a piece called “The Sun Never Says.”

CHOIR SINGING

JON: Good good good…

AMY: Jon has some notes. He tells the sopranos—the highest voices—to get a little quieter in a certain section in order to make room for other voices to be heard.

JON: ...same with the tenors. Make sure that you're out of the way so that we hear the other voices, and then the other voices need to be more present with the melodic material, OK? Let's start at “to the Earth.”

AMY: They go through that section again.

CHOIR SINGING

JON: Good good, beautiful. So this is the thing about listening, right? We need to, while we're singing, sopranos and tenors, we need to listen to the other parts. Because if you listen to the other parts, you'll start to balance it, right? You don't need to really think technically, “oh, I need to do this decrescendo,” you need to think like “that's what I'm supposed to be hearing at that moment,” and that will help you make that happen. One more time, same place and then we're going to go on I promise you.

CHOIR SINGING

AMY: That little moment of instruction went by really fast, but I think it's actually quite profound.

MUSIC

AMY: Jon wants the sopranos and tenors to be a little quieter; he thinks they're dominating the sound a bit too much in this section. But to correct that, the instruction he gives is simply: listen. Tune in to the parts that aren't you. Keep singing, but focus your attention on other voices, and the whole ensemble will naturally come into better balance.

JON: I try to get them to use their, their full voice, their whole instrument, their whole body, all the air that they can. And at the same time, they have to they have to do that while they have their ears open to the people around them, right? So they use their full voice at the same time that they're really listening and making sure that they're attuned to the people around them.

AMY: This is something that will be familiar to all musicians. Creating beautiful sounds with other people is as much of a receptive act as it is an expressive one. In fact, singing and listening are so intertwined, it really makes more sense to think of them as one process with two equal parts.

JON: It is pretty close to 50/50. They have to know how to react to what they're hearing around them and then adjust to make the sound work.

AMY: Our language doesn't do a good job of representing this. At least in English, we talk about “making music” and “listening to music” as if they are entirely separate things. There are those people up there on stage who are the makers, and other people—often very quiet people—who are the listeners. But the actual lived experience of making music isn't like that at all. The wonder of it is being inside a sound that you're hearing and producing simultaneously, and that transcends anything that one individual could do on their own.

JON: And in my mind, it's what's so important and incredible about singing choral music and being involved in a choir as, as a singer, that that realization that you are part of something that's much bigger than yourself.

CASSIDY: I don't know, this sounds so cheesy, but like, it sometimes like, physically...I like, physically feel it in my chest, like in my heart.

AMY: This is Cassidy.

CASSIDY: I can't believe that I'm a part of making this sound happen right now. Like, what a cool experience that we get to have and what a cool thing we get to share with the people around us.

AMY: Yeah. It's not cheesy.

AMY: Another student, Zander, says he joined choir in middle school. And it sounds like for him, it was something of a lifeline.

ZANDER: I was a very shy person, and I was not very outgoing. And I didn't really talk to people that much. And I feel like a lot of that was me internalizing and always thinking about, like, myself and like what I was doing.

AMY: But in choir, more of his attention went to taking in the voices around him, and away from constant self-scrutiny.

ZANDER: You have a voice in your head that you're listening to instead of the other people. But if you actually listen to them, you'll be like, they're not thinking that. That's ridiculous.

AMY: Listening often gets presented as something that we should do. Like it's a chore, or a polite thing to do for other people. But it's actually a gift first and foremost to ourselves—a doorway out of the darkest rooms of our own minds and into something all of us need. Connection.

MAGGIE: When you're singing in a choir, there's this feeling… You get this, like goosebumps, like this feeling that goes all the way through your body.

AMY: This is Maggie.

MAGGIE: But if you're not listening to other people around you as well as yourself, you're not going to be able to make a beautiful sound like we do in choir.

MUSIC

JULIAN: So you don't want to stick out.

AMY: This is Julian.

JULIAN: You don't want to be that guy who's just like, over everybody else. Like, you really have to listen, especially because you don't want to float off pitch.

AMY: So even people like these singers with some natural talent for a certain kind of listening have to work at it—hard. Creating sounds that fit into the group, and enhance it, takes intentional effort. 

JON: OK, can we start at “you owe me,” tenors.

PIANO NOTE

TENORS: ...you owe me…

JON: I'm hearing ….you owe… ...you owe me...

TENORS: ...you owe me.

CHOIR CONTINUES

AMY: Unifying the pitch is just step one. Every vowel sound is tweaked, every consonant is scrutinized. Rhythm, dynamics, tone, color—the singers are focusing deeply on all aspects of their sound, coming into a state of heightened collective attention. And with enough practice, a choir becomes one organism, breathing, singing, and listening together.

JON: The concept in the choir is I am part of a community and my goal is to have this bigger sound that is created from, a group of people that I could never do by myself. It's an amazing sound that I could never do by myself. And I can only do that because I'm part of a bigger entity.

JON: It's this amazing feeling that they get when they are part of something like that.

JON: And nobody... there's no way to explain exactly how that happens. It's just if you get a group of people who really care about that together and they have the ability to do it, then magic happens.

CHOIR: ends piece

AMY: Wow. (choir laughs)

AMY: That magic isn't only available to people who sing in a choir. We're all born into a calling, humming, chirping, howling, ensemble of life on Earth. And maybe remembering that can disrupt this dichotomy that we often get trapped in, where the only options we can imagine are completely dominating spaces with our noise on the one hand, or trying to totally silence ourselves on the other. There is a third way. We are capable of listening, and harmonizing. Attuning ourselves to the sounds around us, and helping to make our places sound more beautiful. Lately, our species hasn't been fitting into the group all that well. We're way too loud, and way off key. But our voices do belong here too. Just like every other creature we've met this season, we're part of this choir.

Credits

AMY: This episode of Threshold was written, reported, and produced by Amy Martin, with help from managing editor Erika Janik and producer Sam Moore. Music by Todd Sickafoose. Post-production by Alan Douches. Fact checking by Sam Moore. Special thanks to Aidan Hughes for gifting me with the hand axe he made during our interview. Threshold is made by Auricle Productions, a non-profit organization powered by listener donations.  You can find out more about our show and support our work at thresholdpodcast.org.

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