The Next Passage

The lower lip presses against the mouth of a short whistle, and a whistled tone alternates with singing or yodeling. In this form of blow-singing known as hindewhu and its uses, a single person can also produce the interlacing; the record even includes a passage blow-sung by a young woman alone. Alternating parts, then, do not naturally belong to many people, nor can they be heard as proof of collaboration on the basis of their acoustic contour alone. Yet the scene of use documented on the same record brings people back in: after a successful hunt, hunters use this kind of blow-singing to send news to the camp, and the women remaining in the camp also whistle and sing in reply. The same action is first directed toward the camp, then issued from the camp. If one listens only to the melody that ultimately takes shape, they seem as though they could be flattened into one continuous line; but the actual reply cannot be blown in advance by the messenger. The hunter blows and sings his own part; if the next passage is constituted by a reply, the women in the camp must take up the action, exchange it for another breath, and blow and sing anew.

The next passage has already finished sounding. An experiment on interleaved melodies inserted the notes of a familiar tune one by one into an unfamiliar melody, with one target note and one distractor note appearing in alternation; when both sides had irregular rhythms, listeners were already able to recognize the target. The experiment then did not complete the familiar tune, nor did it ask another performer to continue it; all the notes had already been played by the apparatus. It merely made the rhythm of the distractor melody regular, yet recognition of the target improved further. This result still leaves a fissure: whether listeners held on to the target more firmly, or more easily let go of the distractor, the experiment did not choose between the two explanations. What can be determined is only the modification itself: what became orderly was the interference, while what became clear was the target to which not a single note had been added.