February 3, 2016

February 3, 2016

Written by Maximus Peperkamp, M.S. Verbal Engineer

Dear Reader, 

In “Beyond Words: Human Communication Through Sound” (2016) by Kraus & Slater, the authors write about the connection between “the patterns of sound we create and the movements that create them.” By “examining” their own verbal descriptions, they seem to go “beyond words”, which form the “principles of information processing that are common to human communication and music.”

These authors try to suspend their cognitivist interpretations, but fail, yet they are able to “peel back these layers” and uncover “the biological foundations of human communication.” Since every healthy human being is born as a vocal, but not as a verbal organism, it should be clear to us that, ontogenetically, our words are always embedded into our sounds. More importantly, since, as a species, it was only fairly recent in evolutionary history that our vocal cords came under functional control of the environment, the phylogenetic origin of our vocal behavior is determined by our body’s ability to produce and observe sounds.

Sounds produced by and observed with or rather, listened to with our body only have two functions:  signaling safety or threat. This brings us to Sound Verbal Behavior (SVB) and Noxious Verbal Behavior (NVB), two universal response classes, which we have not analyzed due to our infatuation with words. The authors emphasize survival value of speech patterns, but do not recognize the two most basic patterns of vocal verbal behavior, which are involved in the experience and expression of safety and threat. We keep “searching for patterns” that presumably “tell us something about the physical world” as long as we feel threatened and engage in NVB. Only during SVB can we embody our spoken communication. The author's claim “we are not disembodied listeners” refers to SVB. We disconnect from our body during NVB.