This thread was stimulated by an broadcast on Radio 4 this morning. When did we begin to sing? Not make music but to sing.
Evidence for musical instruments goes back about 40 ky but we seem to have had the vocal equipment to sing for about 300 ky. Paintings in the French caverns seem to congregate in areas where there is an acoustic sweet spot. and the pattern of dots in those paintings seem to bear a relation to the resonance patterns at those places. Newgrange in common with other megalithic monuments seems to be designed to resonate.
Mothers and children seem to communicate pre-verbally by musical cooing and humming - songs without words. Songs also seem to imitate the sounds in the environment of the singer; constant sliding scales for the inhabitants of atols, forest noises for the pygmy, throat drones for the mongol and eskimo (like wind blowing over the cold open spaces)
The emotional content of songs can be guessed without knowing the language, even something about the subject though this is easier with more anchient forms. Christianity places a high value on song, Boethius equated the soul and heaven to song. The Kalevala (Finland) and the Australian aboriginal legends speek of song as being the creative force of the universe.
Oddly amongst the great apes we are almost the only ones to sing. Gibbons are the exception, singing and duetting to reinforce bonds. None of the others of the anthropiod family seem to.
Could song have predated speech. What other religions and folk tales make so much of it? Any other comments. This has rather stimulated my juices
Evidence for musical instruments goes back about 40 ky but we seem to have had the vocal equipment to sing for about 300 ky. Paintings in the French caverns seem to congregate in areas where there is an acoustic sweet spot. and the pattern of dots in those paintings seem to bear a relation to the resonance patterns at those places. Newgrange in common with other megalithic monuments seems to be designed to resonate.
Mothers and children seem to communicate pre-verbally by musical cooing and humming - songs without words. Songs also seem to imitate the sounds in the environment of the singer; constant sliding scales for the inhabitants of atols, forest noises for the pygmy, throat drones for the mongol and eskimo (like wind blowing over the cold open spaces)
The emotional content of songs can be guessed without knowing the language, even something about the subject though this is easier with more anchient forms. Christianity places a high value on song, Boethius equated the soul and heaven to song. The Kalevala (Finland) and the Australian aboriginal legends speek of song as being the creative force of the universe.
Oddly amongst the great apes we are almost the only ones to sing. Gibbons are the exception, singing and duetting to reinforce bonds. None of the others of the anthropiod family seem to.
Could song have predated speech. What other religions and folk tales make so much of it? Any other comments. This has rather stimulated my juices