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A Bit of Human Nature

I think appreciation of rhythm is hard to reduce to any one thing, because our bodies, and the world around us, all move to various rhythms. It's probably not an accident that people tend to prefer music between 50-100 beats per minute, the same as the normal range of human heartbeats. Following rhythm most definitely builds coordination. Certainly rhythmic music has been a part of people's mating rituals in many places. But I don't think that's nearly the only primitive use or significance of it.

Drums and drone sounds -- deep, low frequency reverberations like the didgeridoo -- were almost certainly used for communication across distances, especially in the context of war I'd reckon, long before they were ever thought of as music or art. Until contact with African, Indian, and Middle Eastern music, the West and China never used drums for much besides wartime communication, and never fully integrated precussion sounds heavily into their native music forms. To this day, these musical traditions are heavily melody-based, rather than beat-based.
 
MyDoorsAreOpen said:
I think appreciation of rhythm is hard to reduce to any one thing, because our bodies, and the world around us, all move to various rhythms. It's probably not an accident that people tend to prefer music between 50-100 beats per minute, the same as the normal range of human heartbeats. Following rhythm most definitely builds coordination. Certainly rhythmic music has been a part of people's mating rituals in many places. But I don't think that's nearly the only primitive use or significance of it.
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I don't either. I could see how a sense of rhythm might be bastardized to just a sense of timing, which is important to just about everything we do. Maybe that's too much of a stretch - but rhythm is involved with even walking and running, which is about as primitive as it gets.


MyDoorsAreOpen said:
Drums and drone sounds -- deep, low frequency reverberations like the didgeridoo -- were almost certainly used for communication across distances, especially in the context of war I'd reckon, long before they were ever thought of as music or art. Until contact with African, Indian, and Middle Eastern music, the West and China never used drums for much besides wartime communication, and never fully integrated precussion sounds heavily into their native music forms. To this day, these musical traditions are heavily melody-based, rather than beat-based.
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I didn't know that about non-percussive western music. I think of primitive music as being totally percussive, but I guess that shows my bias. When you say the West, how far back? How much about really primitive music (say 50000 years) do people know?
 
^ Well, at that point we're talking archaeological records, rather than historical ones. The problem with prehistoric music is that some instruments decay faster than others, so it's likely we'll never have an accurate record of what was played, with what frequency (in both meanings of the word :) )

I know that the indigenous music of the West had no bass instruments until the 1400s or 1500s, and that drummers were only a part of the military, not part of the choruses, in ancient Greece. Music development in China followed a similar course: music developed as an accompaniment to theater and performance art, and included mostly stringed and wind instruments. Drums were known there, but were used mostly for communication. The Japanese developed the taiko (literally 'big drum') as an art form, borrowed from the military drumming traditions of either the Chinese or the pacific islanders, or both. But it was (and is) typically played unaccompanied by non-percussion instruments.

I'm not sure about indigenous traditions elsewhere (such as the Americas or Siberia), but I associate a very early integration of percussion and melodic instrumentation with Africa and India, and with the Middle East, probably via one or both of these.
 
^ I've gotta think that the simplicity of percussion instruments and their pretty immediate emotional impact (drum circle anyone?) would put their origin waaay far back. There are ~100,000 years of prehistory - surely someone started banging on a rock or a log in that time.

Do you think it's possible that our attraction to music was evolved into us after we were became homo sapiens? That is, the first humans walking around in africa were relatively indifferent to rhythms and melodies, but it was so advantageous that today it's everywhere? Or do you think that we liked it back then just as much as we do now? The earliest instrument is a 50,000 year old flute, but I don't know how much that can really be taken for.
 
Considering the fact that a lot of animals communicate in ways that can be analyzed via musicological means (there actually is a science called zoomusicology) I think that music was with us in some sense for as long as we've existed, and before that. I figure that a species with our degree of evolutionary complexity that happens to communicate primarily with sound would be incapable of being indifferent to rhythm and melody.
 
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The founder of this thread sounds depressed...and you know...even other animals enjoy some of those simple things in life too.

I don't bother analyzing this kind of stuff. I live my life simply as it is. And for the most part, it is awesome.

Kissing feels good. Flowers smell good and are pretty. Not much else can be said about that. haha
 
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