The sound of the whistle

In his absolutely terrifying 1904 short story "Oh, Whistle and I'll Come For You, My Lad," British writer M. R. James tells us about a young professor named Parkins who is recovering from an emotional upset and decides to take a seaside R&R in coastal Suffolk.

Parkins is wandering the beach one day, and finds, half-buried in the sand, an ancient bronze whistle.  A historian himself, he is intrigued, and cleans it up, discovering upon inspection that it has two inscriptions, both in Latin: "Quis Est Iste Qui Venit?" ("Who is this who is coming?") and the more mysterious "Fur Fla/Fle Bis," which Parkins is unable to disentangle, but which James intended us to piece together as "Fūr: flābis, flēbis," which roughly translates to "Thief: if you shall blow, you shall weep."

Parkins, as it turns out, should have worked harder to figure out the second inscription.

Evidently not realizing that he is in a horror story, he blows the whistle, which is unexpectedly loud and shrill.  Nothing happens -- at least immediately.  But later that day, while out on the beach, he sees in the distance an "indistinct personage" who seems to be attempting to catch up with him, but never does.  The person moves in a strange way -- a kind of flapping, flailing motion, not at all like a human running.

Then he starts hearing noises at night, which at first he attributes to mice.  A bellhop has a panic attack while looking up at Parkins's room from the outside, saying that there was a "horrible face" in the window.  One of the maids complains that Parkins didn't have to pull all the bedclothes off the bed and throw them onto the floor in the morning -- when he'd done no such thing.

What the whistle had summoned was an incorporeal creature who fashions itself a body out of whatever happens to be handy -- in the case of the bellhop, for example, a twist of fabric from the curtains.  At the end of the story, as Parkins is lying in bed, sleepless, the light of the Moon coming in through the window, he sees the sheets and blankets on the other bed suddenly pull together into a crumpled humanoid form, and sit up -- then it reaches out its cloth arms, feeling around to try and find him.

It is one of the most flat-out terrifying scenes I've ever read.

I was put in mind of James's story (rather reluctantly) by a paper in the journal Nature Communications Psychology about a fascinating study of what are called "Aztec death whistles" -- ceramic whistles shaped like skulls, that when blown generate an unearthly sound that resembles a high-pitched human scream.

The study looked at human responses to the sounds, and found that one hundred percent of volunteers had "strongly aversive reactions," which is science-speak for "the test subjects nearly pissed their pants."  The researchers did fMRI scans of volunteers' brains, which showed strong responses in the auditory cortex and amygdala (the latter being central to the fear response).  The authors write:

All four skull whistle sound categories were rated similarly in terms of their high negative valence, and they revealed significantly the most negative valence compared with all other sound categories.  Skull whistles trigger significantly higher urgent tendencies than all other sound categories...  Skull whistles sounded more unnatural than original biological sounds (human, animal, nature) and exterior sounds, and they largely also sounded less natural than some musical sounds (music, instrument)...  The sound of skull whistles thus seems to carry a negative emotional meaning of relevant arousal intensity.  This seems to trigger urgent response tendencies in listeners, which is a typical psychoacoustic and affective profile of aversive, scary, and startling sounds.

The authors admit they have no idea what the whistles were used for, but suggest that they might have been played during human sacrifices.

Because those apparently weren't horrifying enough already.

Anyhow, naturally I wanted to hear these things for myself, so I clicked on the link that has clips of the whistles being blown.

I'd read the paper, so I should have been ready for it, but holy shit, those things are scary-sounding.  The hairs on the back of my neck stood up.  I'm really sound-sensitive, so maybe I had a stronger reaction than you will; but it bears mention that when I listened to the clips, my dog Rosie was asleep on the papasan chair in my office, and she freaked.  Normally Rosie is the most placid of animals; she's very used to my having music going on my computer, as well as hearing voices and other sounds from things like YouTube videos, and ordinarily has zero reaction to any of it.  But when this thing sounded -- and I didn't even have the volume up very high -- she jolted awake, eyes wide, hackles raised, and looked terrified.

So whatever it is that these Aztec death whistles are doing to the brain, I can say with some confidence that dogs also have the same response (at least to judge by a sample size of one).

However, I'm happy to report that thus far, playing the whistle noises hasn't generated any other untoward effects.  I haven't seen any horrible faces in my office window, and I've yet to be chased around my house by an animated bedsheet.  So that's good.  But I don't think I'm going to listen to those whistle clips again.

Suffice it to say that, like M. R. James's character Parkins, I'm not eager to repeat the experience.

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Streams of sound

Even though it's not the area of linguistics I concentrated on, I've always been fascinated with phonetics -- the sound repertoire of languages.  There's more variation in language phonetics than a lot of people realize.  The language with the smallest phonemic inventory seems to be Rotokas, spoken on the island of Bougainville (east of Papua-New Guinea), which has only eleven distinct sounds.  The Khoisan language ǃXóõ, spoken in parts of Botswana and Namibia, is probably the highest, with around a hundred (depending on how finely you slice them), including twenty or so "click consonants" and four different tones (i.e., speaking a vowel with a rising or a falling tone can change the meaning of the word -- a characteristic it shares with Thai, Mandarin, and Vietnamese, and to a lesser extent, Swedish and Norwegian).

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Snow white1991, Phonetic alphabet, CC BY-SA 3.0]

The result is that languages have a characteristic sound pattern that can be picked up even if you don't speak the language.  Check out this video from a few years ago, illustrating how American English sounds to a non-English-speaker:

Then, there's the song "Prisencolinensinainciusol," written by Italian singer Adriano Celentano -- which uses gibberish lyrics with American English phonetics to create a pop song that doesn't make sense -- but to an English-speaking American, sure sounds like it should:

What brings this topic up is some research out of Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest that appeared in the journal NeuroImage this week, that looked at how dogs hear human language.  We can identify the phonemic repertoire of languages we're familiar with, even if we don't speak them.  Can dogs?

Turns out, amazingly, the answer is yes.

"Some years ago I moved from Mexico to Hungary to join the Neuroethology of Communication Lab at the Department of Ethology, Eötvös Loránd University for my postdoctoral research," said lead author, neuroscientist Laura Cuaya.  "My dog, Kun-kun, came with me.  Before, I had only talked to him in Spanish.  So I was wondering whether Kun-kun noticed that people in Budapest spoke a different language, Hungarian.  We know that people, even preverbal human infants, notice the difference.  But maybe dogs do not bother.  After all, we never draw our dogs' attention to how a specific language sounds.  We designed a brain imaging study to find this out."

What they did was to use fMRI technology to look at the brain activity in the primary and secondary auditory cortexes (the main parts of the brain involved in the recognition and processing of sounds) of the brains of seventeen dogs, including Kun-Kun.  First, they compared the response the dogs had to language vs. non-language -- the latter being just random strings of phonemes.  Turns out, dogs can tell the difference, giving lie to the old claim that you can say damn near anything to a dog and as long as you say it in a pleasant tone, they won't be able to tell.

Then, they compared the response the dogs had to speech in the language they were familiar with, and speech in an unfamiliar language -- and it turns out dogs can distinguish those, as well.  So it's not the "naturalness" of the sound flow, which might have been the issue with the nonsense phonemic strings in the first experiment.  But somehow, dogs are picking up on the overall sound pattern of the language, and can tell the one they're familiar with from ones that are unfamiliar, even if the words and sentences they're hearing are ones they've never heard before.

"This study showed for the first time that a non-human brain can distinguish between two languages," said Attila Andics, senior author of the study.  "It is exciting, because it reveals that the capacity to learn about the regularities of a language is not uniquely human.  Still, we do not know whether this capacity is dogs’ specialty, or general among non-human species.  Indeed, it is possible that the brain changes from the tens of thousand years that dogs have been living with humans have made them better language listeners, but this is not necessarily the case.  Future studies will have to find this out."

So your ability to identify spoken languages based upon how they sound, even if you don't understand the words, is shared by dogs.  Makes you wonder what else they understand.  I've had the impression before that when my dog Guinness gives me his intent stare and head-tilt when I'm talking to him, it's because he is really trying to understand what I'm saying, and maybe that's not so far from the truth.  If so, I'm going to be more careful what I say around him.  He already gets away with enough mischief as it is.

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One of my favorite writers is the inimitable Mary Roach, who has blended her insatiable curiosity, her knowledge of science, and her wonderfully irreverent sense of humor into books like Stiff (about death), Bonk (about sex), Spook (about beliefs in the afterlife), and Packing for Mars (about what we'd need to prepare for if we made a long space journey and/or tried to colonize another planet).  Her most recent book, Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law, is another brilliant look at a feature of humanity's place in the natural world -- this time, what happens when humans and other species come into conflict.

Roach looks at how we deal with garbage-raiding bears, moose wandering the roads, voracious gulls and rats, and the potentially dangerous troops of monkeys that regularly run into humans in many places in the tropics -- and how, even with our superior brains, we often find ourselves on the losing end of the battle.

Mary Roach's style makes for wonderfully fun reading, and this is no exception.  If you're interested in our role in the natural world, love to find out more about animals, or just want a good laugh -- put Fuzz on your to-read list.  You won't be disappointed.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

F-word origin

Being a linguistics nerd, I've often wondered why the phonemic repertoire differs between different languages.  Put more simply: why do languages all sound different?

I first ran into this -- although I had to have it pointed out to me -- with French and English.  I grew up in a bilingual family (my mom's first language was French), so while I'd heard, and to a lesser extent spoken, French during my entire childhood I'd never noticed that there were sounds in one language that didn't occur in the other.  When I took my first formal French class as a ninth-grader, the teacher told us that French has two sounds that don't occur in English at all -- the vowel sound in the pronoun tu (represented in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /y/) and the one in coeur (represented as /ø/).  Also, the English r-sound (/r/) and the French r-sound (/ʁ/) aren't the same -- the English one doesn't occur in French, and vice-versa.

The International Phonetic Alphabet [image is in the Public Domain]

Not only are there different phonemes in different languages, the number of phonemes can vary tremendously.  The Hawaiian language has only thirteen different phonemes: /a/, /e/, /i/, /o/, /u/, /k/, /p/, /h/, /m/, /n/, /l/, /w/, and /ʔ/.  The last is the glottal stop -- usually represented in written Hawaiian as an apostrophe, as in the word for "circle" -- po'ai.

If you're curious, the largest phonemic inventory of any human language is Taa, one of the Khoisan family of languages, spoken mainly by people in western Botswana.  Taa has 107 different phonemes, including 43 different "click consonants."  If you want to hear the most famous example of a language with click consonants, check out this recording of the incomparable South African singer Miriam Makeba singing the Xhosa folk song "Qongqothwane:"

It's a mystery why different languages have such dramatically different sound systems, but at least a piece of it may have been cleared up by a paper in Science last week that was sent my way by my buddy Andrew Butters, writer and blogger over at the wonderful Potato Chip Math.  The contention -- which sounds silly until you see the evidence -- is that the commonness of the labiodental fricative sounds, /f/ and /v/, is due to an alteration in our bites that occurred when we switched to eating softer foods when agriculture became prominent.

I was a little dubious, but the authors make their case well.  Computer modeling of bite physiology and sound production shows that an overbite makes the /f/ and /v/ phonemes take 29% less effort than someone with an edge-to-edge bite exerts.  Most persuasively, they found that current languages spoken by hunter-gatherer societies have only one-quarter the incidence of labiodental fricatives as other languages do.

So apparently my overbite and fondness for mashed potatoes are why I like the f-word so much.  Who knew?  As I responded to Andrew, "Wow, this is pretty fucking fascinating."

Once a language develops a sound system, it's remarkably resistant to change, probably because one of the first pieces of language a baby learns is the phonetic repertoire, and after that it's pretty well locked in for life.  In her wonderful TED Talk, linguist Patricia Kuhl describes studying the phonetics of babbling.  When babies first start to vocalize at age about three months, they make sounds of just about every sort.  But between six and nine months, something fascinating happens -- they stop making sounds they're not hearing, and even though they're still not speaking actual words, the sound repertoire gradually becomes the one from the language they're exposed to.  One example is the English /l/ and /r/ phonemes, as compared to the Japanese liquid consonant [ɾ] (sometimes described as being halfway between an English /l/ and an English /r/).  Very young babies will vocalize all three sounds -- but by nine months, a baby hearing English will retain /l/ and /r/ and stop saying [ɾ], while a baby hearing Japanese does exactly the opposite.

If you've studied a second language that has a different phonemic set than your native language, you know that getting the sounds right is one of the hardest things to do well.  As a friend of mine put it, "My mouth just won't wrap itself around French sounds."  This is undoubtedly because we learn the phonetics of our native language so young -- and once that window has closed, adding to and rearranging our phonemic inventory becomes a real challenge.

So if you've ever wondered why your language has the sounds it does, here's at least a partial explanation.  I'll end with another video that is a must-watch, especially for Americans who are interested in regional accents.  I live in upstate New York but was raised in Louisiana and spent ten years living in Seattle, so I've thought of my own speech as relatively homogenized, but maybe I should listen to myself more carefully.

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Most people define the word culture in human terms.  Language, music, laws, religion, and so on.

There is culture among other animals, however, perhaps less complex but just as fascinating.  Monkeys teach their young how to use tools.  Songbirds learn their songs from adults, they're not born knowing them -- and much like human language, if the song isn't learned during a critical window as they grow, then never become fluent.

Whales, parrots, crows, wolves... all have traditions handed down from previous generations and taught to the young.

All, therefore, have culture.

In Becoming Wild: How Animal Cultures Raise Families, Create Beauty, and Achieve Peace, ecologist and science writer Carl Safina will give you a lens into the cultures of non-human species that will leave you breathless -- and convinced that perhaps the divide between human and non-human isn't as deep and unbridgeable as it seems.  It's a beautiful, fascinating, and preconceived-notion-challenging book.  You'll never hear a coyote, see a crow fly past, or look at your pet dog the same way again.

[Note: if you purchase this book from the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]