Sound is like touch at a distance

 I have been editing a lot of film recently: we shot hours and hours in the favela of Recife last month, and have to turn it into a good short film in less than a month, so the pressure is on.  Editing means a lot of time with headphones stuck in my ears, and me lost to the external world.  Several times over the last couple of days, I have heard Rita talking with someone, what sounds like a profound enough conversation that I take off my earphones to see who is visiting... only to find out that it's Helena Iara.

Over the last couple of weeks, Helena Iara has begun to speak.  Yes, there are words that show up, from the expected mommy and dada to strange ones like "ímã" (magnet), but what I'm really talking about is the material stuff of speech, its sounds and rhythms.  When I'm not listening carefully, or when I am paying attention to something else, it sounds as if Helena is talking adult speech.  The tone rises and falls like discourse, the nouns and consonants sound like English or Portuguese, and she has the exact tones of joy and frustration and desire that we associate with speech.

It's cliché to say that 90% of language is non-verbal, but that doesn't make it any less true.  Helena is gathering the lessons of non-semantic language, the tones and music and sounds that will eventually come together to be adult speech.  And she communicates with these sounds, even if she doesn't understand that sounds are supposed to "mean" something, instead of simply being.

By chance, I was listening to an old Radiolab episode a couple of nights ago, where the neuroscientist Anne Fernald suggested that speech begins not as communication, but as a caress (or a punch, a tickle... not as meaning, but as something much more direct).  Across cultures, people talk to babies with almost exactly the same tones of voice, whether soothing or complimenting or disciplining.  Voice serves to embrace a child and educate her, not through its content, but through its music.  Remembering that the cilia and timpanum and hammer that make up hearing are really feeling the motion of the air, Fernald coins the elegant phrase, "Sound is like touch at a distance."

Before Helena is learning language as meaning, she is learning sound as touch, as a direct way to relate with Rita and with me.  Semantics may come later, but for now I'm happy to have touch at a distance.