Birdsong may hold the key to the origins of music Birdsong may have inspired our earliest ancestors to make music Why did our ancestors become interested in music. Was it to attract mates or improve hunting skills? We may never really know the answer, but scientists are looking to the animal kingdom for clues to humankind's age-old need to create, perform and listen to music, according to Clive Cooksen writing in the Financial Times Weekend Edition (11 March 2000). Music, like language is a universal attribute of humanity. Every culture studied by anthropologists makes music for work or play, education or celebration. At a symposium held in Washington recently by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, musicians and scientists came together to try and work out the origins of humanity's need for music. Among the presentations at the conference was the claim that the human response to music involves several areas of the brain that are distinct from those involved in language processing or other listening faculties. Ornithologist Luis Baptistsa from the Californian Academy of Sciences says he's discovered some "fantastic convergences between bird song and music". Some birds, he claims, do not have songs hard-wired genetically in their brains, but these are passed down generation to generation in the form of an oral tradition. Bird songs generally are used to attract a mate - therein may lie the connection with humanity's first use of music as a form of social communication. The only other mammals known to have an extensive singing repetoire are whales. Scientists are just beginning to investigate the extraordinary low-frequency oceanic oratorios of humpback whales, which appear to have a poetic structure with phrases of balanced lengths presented in a specific order. The oldest archaeological evidence of a musical instrument is a 50 000 year old bear bone flute with three finger holes, recovered from a site in Slovenia. Several flutes made from other bones have been found at other Neandertal and Cro Magnon sites in Europe, while a sophisticated eight finger flute made from the wing bones of cranes was discovered at a 9 000 year old site in China. This flute, found with several others, was found to have a carefully selected tonal scale, making it a likely ancestor to the oldest documented music in China which is around 3 000 years old. Although these are some of the oldest surviving instruments, biologist Jella Atema of Boston University, imagines that the first instruments originated around 200 000 years ago, when people noticed that the wind made an interesting sound when blown over hollow objects. Original musical instrumentss may have been reeds or hollow sticks of varying lengths that would have produced different notes - much like the Pan Pipe of today. The original function of music in early human society remains a matter of speculation. Perhaps people used flutes and pipes as hunting instruments to attract birds by imitating their calls. Perhaps they accompanied dancing and celebration, or tribal rituals. The deep mysteries of music are likely to remain impervious to science for generations to come. (Source: Financial Times, March 11, 2000) ©Copyright Prime Origins 2001 CONTACT BRETT HILTON-BARBER primeorigins.co.za is an iafrica.com Private Label site

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