When did our ancestors first engage in creating music? The answer is not known. But music has been around a long time: musical instruments are among the oldest human-made artifacts discovered, far older than our forays into agriculture. The oldest known instrument is a Slovenian bone flute from around fifty thousand years ago. In all likelihood, percussion instruments were in existence long before that, which would be consistent with what has been found in hunter-gatherer societies, as well as with what has been observed among monkeys, which are known to beat on hollow logs in a manner that suggests call and response. Music making is found in the archaeological record of every culture throughout all eras.
Although it is impossible to say for sure, musical qualities were probably present at the very dawn of our history. We know that chimps exhibit a range of vocalizations in different pitches that communicate whether a predator comes from the ground (a snake), the air (an eagle), or another location. It is likely that some kind of proto-music developed simultaneously with the changes in our vocal chords that allowed speech. Perhaps this proto-music was used to establish territory or used during courtship, as is the case with birdsong in different species of bird. Darwin speculated that music making evolved through sexual selection, as a feature that served no other direct survival purpose other than to impress one's potential mate, like the peacock's tail or the bower building of some bird species. In the final analysis, music and speech are intimately intertwined, and speaking of them as separate may disguise their shared origin. Speech itself is sensitive to nuances of pitch. Everything from the rising tone at the end of a sentence that signals a question to the melodic contour of languages such as Chinese where different tonal inflections of the same word convey different meanings shows how music infuses language.
The oldest known song survives only in lyrics inscribed on the wall of an Egyptian tomb 4,300 years ago. We know it's a song because images of singers and musicians playing the harp accompany the text. It's a love song which essentially says, "I love and admire your beauty, I am under it." The world's oldest music is an ancient hymn of the Hurrian people to the moon goddess Nikkal some 3,400 years ago. The musical notation and lyrics were found on a tablet in Syria. There have been at least nine attempts to reconstruct the actual rhythm and melody, yielding wildly divergent results. What is clear is that the music is written in a sophisticated form, and notes were played simultaneously to create harmony. This predates the rise of harmonic writing in Europe by about 2,500 years. A tablet (CBS 10996) from around 1600 BC may be an older example of music. It was once thought to be music theory writing, but could have been a training etude for a lyre player.
Young children start to show a preference for the music of their culture - that is, the music to which they are regularly exposed - by the age of two, around the same time they start to develop specialized speech processing. Cocooned inside the womb, the fetus hears sounds: the heartbeat of its mother, external sounds transmitted through the amniotic fluid. By the fifth month, its auditory system is fully functional. Babies recognize and prefer music to which they were exposed in the womb. Researcher Alexandra Lamont of Keele University in the United Kingdom conducted an experiment in which mothers played a single piece of music repeatedly to their babies during the final three months of pregnancy. In some cases the piece was eighteenth century classical music, and in other cases it was popular music. For one year following the child's birth, each mother was not allowed to play that piece of music, but after the baby's first birthday, Lamont played the music that the baby had heard in the womb, along with another piece matched for style and tempo. The infant would look for a longer time at the speaker from which the familiar music emanated, whether it came from the left or right side. A control group of infants who had not heard any of the music before exhibited no preference.
So music has been with us from the beginning. The cyclic patterns, the rhythms, the cadences, the rise and fall of sounds: we come into life with the world singing to us.
More music articles at Song of Fire (obergh.net/songoffire)
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