Two things in a karaoke affair may hold two important keys to being human: One is the singing voice and the other, the food that is served to calm your nerves and probably as a reward to those who have to listen to your singing.
I know that a good portion of the population also blames the inventor of the karaoke for what also ends some people’s journeys into being human, especially here in the Philippines — those who sing their song “My Way” too much their way. But singing, per se, which means an enterprise wherein we use our vocal folds (commonly known as “vocal chords”), has been found to be quite a wonder compared to musical instruments of the similar size. The January 2008 issue of the Scientific American has a very interesting article entitled The Human Instrument by Dr. Ingo R. Titze. He found out that how the human voice, given its small size, could produce beautiful, rich sounds.
Titze makes the comparison not between humans but with other instruments that produce sound. Given that any instrument that produces sound should have a source, a resonator that would “reinforce the basic sound” and a “radiator” that transmits sound to listeners, Titze says that size-wise, our human instrument would be dismissed by any musical instrument maker because of several reasons. These reasons are: one, the vocal folds — our “source” — are too small and too soft to sustain a range of vibrations that make for what we perceive as “pitches”; two, our airways (resonator) are too short, having a range of only 15-20 centimeters above the larynx and 12-15 centimeters below it, which Titze says is only the size of a piccolo (something like the size of a regular pen), compared to a trumpet’s which uncoils to around two meters.
But Nature found a way to make music through our humanness. By delicately growing something like a “three-component-system” inside our throats, humans are able to do large effects with the little changes we can make with those “components.” These components are parts that we usually dismiss as merely “anatomical” but now we know, that it is also what makes humans like Ms. Kiri Tekanawa capture us all with her sparklingly beautiful voice. These are the ligaments in the vocal folds which get increasingly tense when elongated, the muscle tissue that just does the opposite — they tense up when they shorten — and a mucous layer that acts like the surface of the ocean when wind passes over it from our lungs and out through our mouths. All humans have these same anatomical parts.
But then, if the size of every human’s “musical instrument” does not vary much, why can’t anyone sing like Kiri? There is, of course, such a thing as genetic capital — talent and a life-long discipline — both of which Ms. Tekanawa seems to possess. Some people really have developed a mastery over the reeds inside them that they can gift the world with song. Others who make use of the same mechanism just simply pluck them with haphazard gasps of air and others simply have to endure them as lovingly as they could and appreciate the effort.
I was quite impressed by how far and how deep Dr. Titze has taken interest in the human voice that it seemed like all the aspects of his work reflected it. Aside from having written many scientific studies on the human voice, he is also a distinguished professor in the University of Iowa in speech pathology and audiology as well as directs the National Center for Voice and Speech at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts. He also teaches singing in opera, Broadway and pop. Now that is one science dude who really knows his music as a science and as an art.
Now, if you are one of those who, like most, join karaoke parties for the fun and company, then you could not have missed out on the food that is served — cooked food, that is. If Dr. Richard Wrangham, a biological anthropologist at Harvard, turns out to be correct in his theory, it is cooking that made for our larger brains and smaller jaws — that make us different from our ape-like ancestors. I also took interest after having read it in an unrelated article in the same issue of Scientific American. Dr. Wrangham is so keen on his theory that he spent a lot of time eating what chimps eat to find out what would happen to him if he did. He picked chimp food since chimps are our closest primate cousins. By finding out what they eat, he could have a clue on what made humans split from the direction that led to chimps now. And so far, he still has not found chimps gathering around a bonfire making barbeque or filming cooking shows.
He postulates that what made us split from the direction that gave rise to chimps was our love affair with fire and the wonders it could do to raw food. Scientifically, cooking food changes the molecular structure of the food, making it easier to digest. Easy digestion means less energy we spend chewing and processing food to convert to energy for our bodily survival. Wrangham calculated that Homo erectus (which had a brain which was 50 percent bigger than that of its predecessor, Homo habilis) would have had to spend 5.7 to 6.2 hours a day just chewing food. In other times, Homo erectus would have had to look for something to chew. At this rate, we would not have had the impetus to evolve the way we did. But with cooking, Wrangham thinks Homo erectus could have eaten a lot more and with ease which would mean time for other things like we did — probably singing and maybe fighting over the singing.
The problem with Wrangham’s theory, his skeptics argued, is that it lacks enough evidence that Homo erectus indeed had some control of fire, enabling him to use it for cooking. His only evidence so far is a spot in Kenya where there was scorching that dates 1.6 million years ago, where there is a variety of burned wood types which could indicate some intentional use of fire. But he will not stop there. He is studying starch granules to find out if there was cooking that went on there. Until he gathers more evidence, this theory about cooking having set us on a journey to become the humans that we are now, will remain in the oven, yet to be served as an established dish of anthropological science.
So the next time you engage in a karaoke event, pay more attention to the musical instrument that you are and even to the cooked food with its secret sauces. Their wonders are being unlocked for us by scientists like Titze and Wrangham to see what makes for our human inner mission control, architecture and plumbing. Now, your part is to show a bit more of what it means to be human by being kind and patient to your dear friends who just have to hold on to those microphones a little bit longer to sing it their way.
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