PrimatePoetics | SocialFiction

The One-Hit DaDa-Wonders of the Rainforest!

The gibbon is the most dandified primate roaming the forests of Southeast Asia. The Chinese have long considered it to be the wisest and noblest of all animals, and in the eighteenth century the West took over this sentiment when it proclaimed the gibbon to be the animal closest to us in the great scheme of evolution. If you would care to look up the third volume of Richard Owen’s On the Anatomy of Vertebrates (published in 1868) you will find, hidden between endless anatomical minutiae, the first known reference to the distinguishing talent of the gibbon: “They alone, of brute Mammals, may be said to sing.” Ten years later, Thomas Huxley was the first to make a gibbon tune widely available to the general public: “Goek, goek, goek, goek, goek ha ha ha ha haaaaa.” Huxley goes on to mention a naturalist and musician by the name of Mr. Waterhouse, who wrote down gibbon songs in musical notation with the suggestion that a competent violinist “could give a good idea of the gibbon’s composition.” And with these media appearances the music of the gibbon, the lesser ape, became a cult phenomenon.

The majority of gibbon songs are duets, with the female taking the lead and the male responding as a second voice to their rhythmic “great calls.” Alone or in pair, the gibbon sings with gusto! A typical song can be heard at distances of up to two kilometers and will last, on average, ten to twenty minutes, but songs of over eighty minutes have been reported. Biomusicologists rave about the perfect pitch of the gibbon and its keen sense of rhythm. A white-handed gibbon has been observed to call in synch with a metronome; further examination showed that its favourite speed was a cool and collected 60 BPM. Intriguingly, it is far from clear what this singing is supposed to mean or to achieve. Some researchers think that it is meant to demarcate territory, to make the singer known to possible future mates, or to scare away predators, but research is far from conclusive.

The gibbon in all its loudness is not saying anything. The content of a gibbon song is hardwired. Gibbons sing only at fixed periods of the day, and each species and each sex can sing only its own song. When a gibbon is raised without coming into contact with any members of its own species, but only with those of other species, it will still sing its own song. Can it even hear a song of another species? Hybrid gibbons born in zoos sing predictable hybrid songs. Perhaps the gibbon is trying to hypnotize everything that has ears in its territory.

Primatepoetics has a special interest in the gibbon because it sits at the closing end of the primate language domain. The gibbon's condition suggests possibilities of form, use and content of the same ur-faculties that has turned into language and conversation in us and in pure sound and high drama in the Gibbon. The Gibbon is the Dada ape, the ape that chose not for the path of structured information but for raw effectiveness, for audiological mind control. Language is a virus from the great ape; music is an antidote from the lesser ape. Poetry, in our sense of the word keeps them in balance.

Based on a previously published article in the Brooklyn Rail.