Melody

Abstract

The Belgian linguist Jef Verschueren (1985) lists some 650 different speech acts, ‘things people do with words’, from ‘abandon’ to ‘zip one’s lip’. Such a list has not been compiled for ‘sound acts’, but that is not because we do not do things with sound. With sound we announce our presence, hail, warn, call for help, lull to sleep, comfort, and much more. Birds have their pleasure calls, distress calls, territorial defence calls, flight calls, flock calls and so on, but, as Schafer noted (1977: 34), so have people. In the right context, music can be a pleasure call, the car horn a territorial defence call, the police siren an alarm call and so on. In all this the dividing line between speech, music and other sounds is thin. Many of the same kinds of things can be done verbally, musically or by means of ‘noises’. It is only recently that musical sounds such as the hunting horn, the postman’s horn or the church bells have been replaced by non-musical sounds. And with the sound of the hunting horn much could be done. It could open and close the hunt, announce the different animals by means of little fanfares, cheer on the dogs, give warning, call for aim, utter special signs of pleasure, and more. Train whistles, similarly, not only allowed drivers to pass on many different messages between trains, but even to do so in a personal style (Schafer, 1977: 81).