Origin of Music

Ananda Gurung

Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering

Dhulikhel, Kavre

Nepal

Email: anan_gurung@hotmail.com

ABSTRACT:

The origin of music is somewhat speculative at best, due to the original creators, being on the razor’s edge of self awareness, having no reason to document their activities for future readers. The study of the origins and purpose of music has been an active pursuit of musicologists and biologists for well over a century. I review the biological findings on animal communication and human music and language processing and the available theories on the origin of music. We can only guess as to how music was created in the primitive psyche of the time. What follows is pretty much my guess.

INTRODUCTION:

Music has a long and complex history. It may predate language (and certainly predates the written word) and is found in every known culture, past and present, varying wildly between times and places.

"Music history" is the distinct subfield of musicology and history which studies the history of music theory.

The development of music among humans occurred against the backdrop of natural sounds. It was, in all probability, influenced by birdsong and the sounds other animals use to communicate. Some evolutionary biologists have theorized that the ability to recognize sounds not created by humans as "musical" provides a selective advantage.

Prehistoric music, once more commonly called primitive music, is the name given to all music produced in preliterate cultures (prehistory), beginning somewhere in very late geological history.

Traditional Native American and Australian Aboriginal music could be called prehistoric, but the term is commonly used to refer to the music in Europe before the development of writing there. It is more common to call the "prehistoric" music of non-European continents, especially that which still survives folk, indigenous, or traditional music.

The prehistoric era is considered to have ended with the development of writing, and with it, by definition, prehistoric music. "Ancient music" is the name given to the music that followed.

The term Early music era may also refer to contemporary but traditional or folk music, including Asian music, Jewish music, Greek music, Roman music, the music of Mesopotamia, the music of Egypt, and Muslim music.

AN EVOLUTION PRIMER:

The study of the origins and purpose of music has been an active pursuit of musicologists and biologists for well over a century. Musicology, the loosely applied and broadly used term for the scholarly study of music, has evolved over the last 70 years to produce several new subfields of study. 

In 1991, a Swedish biologist named Nils L. Wallin, coined the term Biomusicology, and the school of science that deals with the study of music from a biological point of view was born. The three main branches of Biomusicology are evolutionary musicology, neuromusicology, and comparative musicology. The subfield of Evolutionary Musicology contains the study of musical origins, and significant strides have been made in recent decades under this new field of study.

Darwin's theories of musical origin rested in his observations of the gibbon-apes use of musical cadence as a part of the mating ritual to attract the opposite sex. Darwin concluded that early man, therefore, must have first used music for the same purpose.

Edward MacDowell, internationally-trained composer, author, and the Chair of Music at Columbia University, considered Darwin's theory as "inadequate and untenable". In a speech given at Columbia, later published in 1912, MacDowell found more plausibility in the theory of Theophrastus, the successor of Aristotle, in which the origin of music is attributed to the whole range of human emotion.

In 1948, the German musicologist, Curt Sachs, declared that all mythological, scientific, and historical attempts to discover the origins of music are all wrong! He blasted the many theories then presented on a more or less scientific basis, which Sachs referred to as "speculative hypothesis" - the theories that "man has imitated the warbling of birds, the he wanted to please the opposite sex, that his singing derived from drawn-out signaling shouts, [and] that he arrived at music via some coordinated, rhythmical teamwork". If these theories were true, he asserts, "Some of the most primitive survivors of early mankind would have preserved a warbling style of song, or love songs, or signal-like melodies". Science, Sachs admits, would prefer "the more substantial, indeed irrefutable proofs of prehistorians, who excavate the tombs and dwelling places of races bygone. But not even the earliest civilizations that have left their traces in the depths of the earth are old enough to betray the secret of the origins of music." While the archeological views of Sachs may ultimately prove true, the quest to unearth the origins of music continues.

In 1995, Ivan Turk, a researcher at the Divje Babe archeological site in Slovenia, uncovered a flute, pierced by spaced holes, made from the femur bone of a young cave bear. Similar prehistoric bone flutes have been found at various sites around the world, but the Divje Babe bone flute, or Neanderthal Flute, as called by Turk, is approximately 43,100 years old, and is claimed to be the world's oldest musical instrument. It’s been made by everyone dating back further then the cavemen. It wasn’t actually a discovery.

ANIMAL COMMUNICATION:

When an animal utters a cry of joy or pain it expresses its emotions in more or less definite tones; and at some remote period of the earth's history all primeval mankind must have expressed its emotions in much the same manner. When this inarticulate speech developed into the use of certain sounds as symbols for emotions - emotions that otherwise would have been expressed by the natural sounds occasioned by them —then we have the beginnings of speech as distinguished from music, which is still the universal language. In other words, intellectual development begins with articulate speech, leaving music for the expression of the emotions.

In mammals, one of the more well-known communication systems is that involving the long and complex calls produced by humpback whales. Humpback whales migrate over distances of several thousand kilometers to specific breeding grounds. The male humpback whales produce varied and extremely complicated calls, lasting from 5 to 35 minutes and with an extraordinary variation in pitch as well as timing (Payne, 2000). While this system is not easy to study, since it is hard to make direct observation of the calling and responding animals, recent work suggests that the calling male’s aggregate in a leak and that females probably select males based on their calls. Thus, the humpback calls would be another example of call complexity generated by sexual selection.

HUMAN SOUND COMMUNICATION:

Early man most likely took some interest in the sounds around him, in some cases it meant life or death, as in the roar of a tiger, or it was pleasing to the ear, as in a bird singing away. I can imagine that after a successful hunt, the hunters would prance and growl around a fire emulating the sounds of the fierce beast they had just slain. They might even have started hitting sticks together in an attempt to emulate the sounds of their clubs thumping dully upon the head of some prey, or the hollow melon sound of a neighbor’s skull when they were fighting amongst themselves over some chunk of meat, or for the best looking mate. The former most likely, due to the fact that the latter would be a six of one half dozen of the other proposition, cosmetics having yet to be invented. In any case, as far as the origin of music is concerned, drums were probably the first primitive music instrument if we remove the human voice from the equation

Humans possess a large number of species-specific adaptations for sound production which enable us to produce an unrivalled number of different sounds. For example, monkeys and apes cannot produce the large number of speech sounds – most notably the majority of the consonants – that humans produce. The basis of the diversity of human speech sounds is found in the morphological arrangement of the vocal system. The basic structure and mechanism are similar to other mammals, but a notable difference is that the larynx has descended into the throat, leaving the tongue free to move in two dimensions in the vocal tract (Fitch, 2000). Most importantly, however, is that the human ability to produce a large variety of sounds is accompanied by an unusual ability for vocal learning and imitation, which is not found in any of our closest relatives (Fitch, 2000). Many of the adaptations for human sound production are soft structures that do not show up in fossils, so it is difficult to date the origin of human sound communication conclusively. Three features that are found in fossil material may be related to human sound production (Frayer and Nicolay, 2000; Morley, 2002), however, though none of them can be linked conclusively to human speech (Fitch, 2000). The hyoid bone (tongue bone) has a special structure in humans, and of course the mobility of the tongue is a prerequisite for speech production in recent humans. Also, the human rib cage has a specialized, barrel-like structure, which is not found in apes or monkeys, and which probably is important for controlling the air stream to the vocal cords. Finally, the protruding nose of humans is probably important in the production of speech sounds (Frayer and Nicolay, 2000). These adaptations are found in early humans dating back 1.5 million years, but probably were first fully developed 400.000 years ago (Morley, 2002). Within

The last two million years the evolution of the human brain involved rapid enlargement, i.e. a tripling of volume. During this development, the specialized centers for language processing probably appeared, as did the strong lateralization of the language-related centers.

MUSIC AND HUMAN HEARING:

To understand the evolution of human hearing it is important to know which functions hearing is serving and their selection (survival) value. Three major functionalities of human hearing may be identified quite easily (Christensen-Dalsgaard, 2002). One is a reflexive response to loud, sudden sounds, which is probably a primitive response reflecting the fact that loud, sudden sounds usually are ‘danger signals,’ since such sounds are warnings about mechanical events in the vicinity of the observer. A second functionality is the ability of our auditory system to assign sound components to sound sources or acoustic objects (Yost, 1993). This is not a trivial task, given that sound components are mixed at the two eardrums, and is probably a complicated computation comparing parameters such as onsets, frequencies, location, simultaneous amplitude modulation etc. for the different sound components (Bregman, 1990). Finally, an important function of hearing must be that of analyzing human language sounds, i.e. to translate the sounds to their symbolical equivalent and process the syntactical structure.

The search for brain centers or networks dedicated to music processing is important in the context of evolution, since such centers would show that there was sufficiently strong selection pressures associated with music to lead to dedicated centers. On the basis of current knowledge it is difficult to maintain, however, that there is large selection pressures associated with music in humans. Also, it is evident that one of the features of persons with amusia(s) is that they generally are individuals who function very well in other respects. So even if there is an evolutionary benefit associated with musicality, it may not be large enough to drive the evolution of large, dedicated brain structures.

ORIGIN OF MUSIC:

Before the development of the electric guitar and the use of synthetic materials, a guitar was defined as being a musical instrument having "a long, fretted neck, flat wooden soundboard, ribs, and a flat back, most often with incurved sides". Instruments similar to the guitar have been popular for at least 5,000 years. The oldest known graphic representation of an instrument displaying all the essential features of a guitar being played is a 3,300 year old stone carving of a Hittite minstrel.

Music is a human universal; there are no human cultures that do not pro-duce music. Indeed, one current theory is that music is non-adaptive and just uses the vocal production and analysis apparatus already present due to an intense selection for language (the ‘auditory cheesecake’ theory described above, Pinker, 1997). In that case, it may be difficult to explain the universal appearance of music in human societies. Furthermore, there are indications that music could be adaptive. For one thing, music has special functions with regard to social bonding, for example between parent and infant (Trevarthen, 1979; Trehub, 2001), and the predispositions for melodic as well as rhythmical interactions between parent and infant may be the basis of musical ability (Dis-sanayake, 2000), but music also has the feature that it can coordinate the behavior of large groups where language may not be as useful. Another explanation for the origin of music has been that music originates through sexual selection (Darwin, 1871; Miller, 2000), where females should prefer males with a large repertoire. This is in complete analogy with the songbird communication system. In the case of songbirds, however, the vocal communication shows the expected sexual dimorphism, i.e., the females do not use the large variety of songs found in the males; only the brains of male birds show large nuclei dedicated to song learning and song production. Now, if this theory applied to humans, we should see a robust sexual dimorphism in the abilities for music production in males and females. This sexual dimorphism is simply not found in humans – there is no clear difference in musical abilities between the sexes (accounting for social and historical bias). Furthermore, even though males may serenade there is no clear and robust behaviour associated with music-making and courtship. Therefore, I do not believe that sexual selection in the form known in other animals is applicable to music, nor, in my opinion, is it applicable to other human art forms. I do believe, however, that there is sexual selection for traits in humans, but that is probably for more obvious traits such as male power.

                  

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT:

I thank the editorial staff of this journal for their perceptive and constructive criticism. The work has been supported by our group members.

REFERENCES:

Sachs, Curt, the Wellsprings of Music, McGraw-Hill, 1965.

Bradbury J.W. & Vehrencamp SL (1998). Principles of animal communication. Sunder-land: Sinauer Associates.

Cooke, D. (1959). The language of music, repr. 2001. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Darwin, C. (1871). The descent of Man, and selection in relation to sex. London: Murray

Payne, K. (2000). The progressively changing songs of humpback whales: A window on the creative process in a wild animal. In Wallin, N.L., Merker, B., & Brown, S. (Eds.), op. cit. (pp. 135-150).