The Origins of Music: Preface - Preface

basically the same way,but differently from others.It is easy for experi-

enced human observers to identify each animal’s pant-hoot as a kind of

signature.Variation is considerable and probably meaningful,but it is

always based on a single modal form.As far as I know,no one in the field

who has studied the behavior of chimpanzees,in the wild or in captivity,

ever hinted at the possibility that an individual chimpanzee has a reper-

toire of several consistently distinct patterns of pant-hooting.

Consider the song of the Kloss gibbon in Indonesia (see Geissmann,

this volume).Again,this is an emotive,nonsymbolic signal used in dif-

ferent forms by both sexes for locating each other in the forest and for

maintaining territories (Tenaza 1976;Geissmann 1993).As with chim-

panzee pant-hooting,a lot of variation exists,but each individual has its

own distinctive,modal song pattern (figure 3.6).As far as I know,there

is no recorded case from any of the ten species of gibbons of an indi-

vidual repertoire of more than one basic song type,although several

gibbons perform interesting male-female duets (Lamprecht 1970;Geiss-

mann 1993).A final point will be relevant later.In both chimpanzees and

gibbons the basic patterning of these complex calls appears to be innate,

and develops normally in social isolation and,as Geissmann (1993)

showed in gibbons,in intermediate or mixed form in hybrids.

These elaborate and highly individualistic sequences of patterned

sounds,although clearly candidates for consideration as animal songs,

are quite constrained from an acoustic point of view.Each individual has

one fundamental modal pattern,stable over long periods of time,around

which all of its variants are grouped.There is no individual “repertoire”

of songs or pant-hoots,if we take that term to imply a set of acoustically

43 Origins of Music and Speech

Figure 3.6

Samples of songs of three female Kloss gibbons show that,although there is variation,each

tends to conform to a single,individually distinctive pattern.(From Tenaza 1976.)

Fig.3.6

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