The origin of music

For thousands of years, music has played an essential role in social interactions, rituals and ceremonies, although its exact origins are shrouded in mystery. From an evolutionary viewpoint, the desire to produce musical sounds is not unique to man. We are all familiar with the sound of birds singing. Some non-human primates also sing; monkeys in the rainforests of Asia and gibbons in the jungles of Thailand produce haunting musical calls: their duets probably serve to strengthen pair bonding, but singing may also serve to alarm other group members (Chung and Geissmann, 2000; Geissmann, 2002). If musical sounds are important in primate communication, they must also have been essential in early human communication. Perhaps as suggested by Charles Darwin (Darwin, 2004), singing may even have preceded speech and might have been the primary method of human communication.

One can only speculate as to why our ancestors produced their first musical instruments; it may have been an attempt by early man to imitate natural sounds, such as the wind blowing through a hollow reed or the singing of a bird. The earliest known instruments are flutes, made from bone or mammoth ivory, dating back tens of thousands of years to the Palaeolithic Age. For example, in the Geißenklösterle cave near Blaubeuren in Germany, archaeologists uncovered the oldest known musical instrument – a primitive, but carefully constructed, swanbone flute estimated to be at least 35 000 years old (Fig 1.1; Hahn and Münzel, 1995; Münzel et al., 2002). Similar flutes have been found at other locations in Europe, suggesting that music was certainly a part of Stone Age life (see also Section 5.5).

But more sophisticated forms of music also have ancient roots.