Designed huh? Ooookay. Human speech is relatively new in our evolution but obviously important but just one aspect of survival of the species as it relates to hearing. W.r.t.. "tone" and emotion most mammals can detect that independent of other information context. It’s not uniquely human."Designed" because language ALWAYS present an"irreducible complexity"on 2 levels...
Human language are not reducible to signaling system, human language exist on 2 levels of reality: " real" and "imaginary" in the sense of the complex numbers and these 2 levels are always actual...In signaling system one level is only potential the other actual...
When i signal to another animal to go there, i must point the place.... and add a sound...
In human language the place continue" to exist" before the pointing and before the sound in the collective memory with the words representing it....It is a mutation of the brain that make human able to transport and convey this another Imaginary reality permanently...
Also there is the "poetical" level and the "prosaic" level but i cannot explain it here it will be too long... Suffice to say that language exist on 2 levels at the same time, the brain processing the 2 one into the other at the same time...
Also music and language begun together and comes from one another....speech and music are Body act not only mouth act...Language here also work on 2 levels simultaneously: the body and the mouth apparatus...Studies in the genesis of oral tradition demonstrated this fact long ago....
«Timbre is, beyond question, the primary parameter that allows us to discriminate between different vowels, but vowels also have intrinsic pitch, intensity, and duration. There are striking correspondences between the number of vowels and the number of pitches in musical scales across cultures: an upper limit of roughly 12 elements, a lower limit of 2, and a frequency peak at 5–7 elements. Moreover, there is evidence for correspondences between vowels and scales even in specific cultures, e.g., cultures with three vowels tend to have tritonic scales. We report a match between vowel pitch and musical pitch in meaningless syllables of Alpine yodelers, and highlight the relevance of vocal timbre in the music of many non-Western cultures, in which vocal timbre/vowel timbre and musical melody are often intertwined. Studies showing the pivotal role of vowels and their musical qualities in the ontogeny of language and in infant directed speech, will be used as further arguments supporting the hypothesis that music and speech evolved from a common prosodic precursor, where the vowels exhibited both pitch and timbre variations.»
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01581/full
The recognition of human sound timbre and speech is more immediate and more faster than any other prepared or artificial sounds....Survival of human group ask for that...
«Human listeners seem to have an impressive ability to recognize a wide variety of natural sounds. However, there is surprisingly little quantitative evidence to characterize this fundamental ability. Here the speed and accuracy of musical-sound recognition were measured psychophysically with a rich but acoustically balanced stimulus set. The set comprised recordings of notes from musical instruments and sung vowels. In a first experiment, reaction times were collected for three target categories: voice, percussion, and strings. In a go/no-go task, listeners reacted as quickly as possible to members of a target category while withholding responses to distractors (a diverse set of musical instruments). Results showed near-perfect accuracy and fast reaction times, particularly for voices. In a second experiment, voices were recognized among strings and vice-versa. Again, reaction times to voices were faster. In a third experiment, auditory chimeras were created to retain only spectral or temporal features of the voice. Chimeras were recognized accurately, but not as quickly as natural voices. Altogether, the data suggest rapid and accurate neural mechanisms for musical-sound recognition based on selectivity to complex spectro-temporal signatures of sound sources.»
https://asa.scitation.org/doi/10.1121/1.3701865
Then language designed on these 2 levels are uniquely for highly evoluated mammals like human or dolphins probably or other similar bio type in the cosmos ......It is an irreducible complexity working/processing phenomenon, a new stasis in the history of evolution.... Denying that is making appeal to an old static genetic innate paradigm like the Chomskyan one....The genetic code is no more perceived like in the sixties and seventies of the last century....