sounds (Papousˇek,Papousˇek,and Harris 1987);between four and six
months they produce more substantial vowellike sounds,bilabial trills,
squealing,and growling (Locke 1993:176).True babbling begins between
six and ten months of age (Oller and Eilers 1988) and occurs more when
alone than with others.
Children spontaneously initiate speech activities—sound play,word
play,distorted speech,and monologues—that are unlike any shown to
them by their elders.In the southern Highlands of Papua New Guinea,
Kaluli parents consider such antics to interfere with proper development
of language and specifically terminate them whenever they hear them.
Nevertheless,Kaluli children,like all children,continue to manipulate
pitch,prosody,and timing in their sound play,and invite turn taking
(Schieffelin 1990:99).The same applies to patterning and elaborating
movements in games and dance,which children everywhere invent and
enjoy.
Such sound play is surely musical.Indeed,one could maintain that the
differences between song and speech prosody are only in degree of elab-
oration,including sustaining,repeating,and patterning tones such as
exaggeration and regularization reminiscent of the ritualization process.
Kartomi (1991) studied the spontaneous improvised musical phrases
uttered by children while they concentrated on their play,and claimed
that “play song”is distinct from the lullabies and nursery rhymes or songs
created by adults for children.Rather,it is created by children for use
in their own adultless play world (p.53).Such “musical doodling”is
ephemeral.The few improvised songs that are remembered and adapted
into the corpus of established children’s songs tend to be those whose
texts express a memorable experience of pleasure,pain,fear,solidarity,
or derision,and these songs are normally sung when playing games,
eating together,and teasing each other,and on occasions demanding
solidarity with each other (p.62).Even these more stable songs include
an element of improvisation.Whereas rhythm and meter are usually
primary and fixed,melody and form are secondary and variable.Such
a propensity in children suggests that ancestral adults could well have
followed a similar course in ritualizing natural vocalizations at times of
strong emotions and when solidarity was displayed or required.
As children naturally draw,sing,dance,and play with words,they spon-
taneously like to make believe,dress up in costumes,and adorn their pos-
sessions and surroundings.Although these characteristic and universal
activities can be called play,it seems clear that they predispose humans
to ceremonial participation.They may easily be channeled into appro-
priate ritual and artistic elaborations,just as children’s play with objects
and wish to imitate adults’ practical activities develop into ordinary sub-
sistence activity.403 Antecedents of the Temporal Arts