A. Davis --

There is also yodelling. As I understand it, yodelling as a means of communications evolved in all, or nearly all, places where people are routinely separated by each other by rough terraign and/or long distances -- not just in the Alps, but also the Apalachian mountains (where it is called Hollaring, I think) and among the Mbuti (Pygmy)peoples of the Congo (where vision is not blocked by mountains, but by trees).

Anyway, as to your question of why tunes are not misheard the way lyrics are, I'm not sure.

But a couple of weeks ago, I was surfing the Web, trying to find info on what the wavelengths of various notes are. I know A above middle C (The penultimate note in "Nonny, Nonny, Boo, Boo") is 440 wavelengths per second, but I don't remember the others. I terrible at math, so most of what I found was incomprehensible to me (but it was a great cure for my insomnia ;-)). One thing that did stick out, though, was that the spaces between notes are based on ratios, and not linear differences, and that the brain recognises a note based on its relationship to other notes.

I'm thinking now that maybe this is related to an area of our brains that orient ourselves in space, and that our brains map out a melody the same way we scan a landscape to find our way around -- or maybe not. But if so, than that function of the brain has been around for a lot longer, and is a lot more "stable" than the function of phonetic decoding (If we interpreted our environment with the same decree of accuracy that we do our language, we'd be bumping into walls all the time!).

There was a thread around here somewhere this winter about tone deafness inspired by an NPR report (but for some reason I can't find it through a Forum search --??), but now I'm wondering if tone deafness is either learned (or rather musical recognition is not learned) or if tone deafness is a sort of musical dyslexia...

Just a thought...