Telephasic Workshop

This entire album is about the developing child.

In so many ways. But this song drives this point home.

As children are developing, they experience language first as phonemes, never attributing meaning to the syllables and sounds they hear because they simply don't have enough life experience and they're way too disjointed to make sense out of them. Like in "The Color of the Fire" (another great track off the album Music Has the Right to Children), as the girl is sounding out "you" she makes the sound of the letter "y" ("yuh"). I think this is technically two phonemes but I would bet that the sound confused you when you first heard it. "'Yuh'? What could that sound possibly mean?" was a popular question I had until I understood the song better.

Once you have enough phonemes in quick enough succession, you can create a morpheme, or a meaningful unit of a word (like a prefix or suffix). After a long while of hearing nothing but indiscriminate sounds that, when put together, mean nothing, a bass-y voice says something that sounds an awful lot like "Boards of Canada" (4:39). Likely, these are just a bunch of phonemes that BoC decided to put close enough together so that they'll be recognized as actual words.

This is meant to simulate what it must be like to learn your first word. To derive meaning from a certain group of fractions of syllables. You likely latched onto the sound of these words and wait with bated breath for them to play the coherent sounds once more, which BoC does at 5:20. That's why a child will say a certain word a ridiculous amount of times once learning it ("mama" "dada" "I love you"). It's consistent and, to a baby learning new things every second, consistency is appreciated and necessary.

This song is simulating the assimilation of phonemes into the young child's mind, though it can also be an adult phenomenon. Try going to a new country or surrounding yourselves with foreign language-speakers and you'll find you've already built your own Telephasic Workshop.