YOu don't believe it.
Well, that goes right up there with "I just don't think so".
It's insulting because you are accusing me of lying, which I am not, and it's another symptom of refusing to consider the fascinating possibilities surrounding the origins of music, for reasons I just don't get. Saying God did it is fine if you aren't interested, but if you aren't then just say that it's enough for youto believe that God made music for Himself, but that you understand why others want to explore the possibilities. Of course, if science said that about everything, it wouldn't get very far.
Anyway-
They not only drum, they sing.
Lest we humans get too smug about our standing as a musical species, consider the gibbons, our most distant living ape relatives. All twelve species sing, and in ten of them, mated pairs engage in duets. (To hear gibbons sing, go to www.gibbons.de)
To qualify as a singer, an animal must repeat several series of notes in a recognizable temporal pattern, explains zoologist Thomas Geissmann, of the TierS?iche Hochschule Hannover in Germany. He's analyzed singing in nonhuman primates and proposes that their "music" might have developed along an evolutionary path that human ancestors wandered down too.
Singing evolved independently at least four times among nonhuman primates, contends Geissmann. Depending on which classification scheme is used, some twenty-six species sing. Besides gibbons, singing primates include the Madagascan lemurs called indris, the tarsiers of Sulawesi, and the titi monkeys of South America. None of these groups perch particularly close together on the primate family tree.
Geissmann proposes that the songs of all these species may have evolved from common primate vocalizations known as loud calls. Many primates, particularly adult males, belt out characteristic notes when groups meet or when something alarming happens. The singing routines of modern species are more elaborate than these calls, but there are some suggestive similarities. All songs and many calls, for example, contain runs of relatively pure notes.
Oddly enough, all the singing primates Geissmann has studied fall into the exclusive club of monogamous mammals (only 3 percent or so of all mammals tend to have one mate at a time). Whereas singing may originally have evolved in order to attract a mate or to help defend resources, Geissmann muses that duet singing in primates might have arisen along with monogamy. He imagines that a mate might have found it beneficial to repeatedly interrupt a partner's ongoing "song bout" with little phrases of his (or her) own to let potential home wreckers know that the partner was already taken. As more complex duetting evolved, singing might have strengthened pair bonds. At least in siamang gibbons, new mates have to learn the fine coordination between his part and hers.
Because our closest living relatives, the apes, give loud calls, Geissmann suspects our distant primate ancestors did too. Chimpanzees pant-hoot. Gorillas produce short bursts of notes, often while thumping their chests. Orangutans have a loud call. In fact, says Geissmann, "the only apes without loud calls are humans." Maybe these calls turned into our songs.—S.M.
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
- Geissmann,T.(2002). Gibbons songs and human music from an evolutionary perspective.
- In Wallin, N.L.,Merker,B.,and Brown,S., The origins of music
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While the anatomy of their vocal tracts does not seem to have permitted their acquisition of facile vocal expression (beyond grants and hoots), they seem to manage to hoot and beat together. Two or more male gorillas have been known to vocalise together in a manner that foreshadows human singing without words.
Dr. Schaller, who has researched on this, playfully calls this the Gorillian chants, a forerunner of the Gregorian Chants of medieval Europe.
And the primatologist Dr. Jane Goodall writes that chimpanzees engage in choral pant-hoots and drumming displays. These are non-referential or abstract items, not relative to any specific information transfer but just for fun! Falk speculates that our ancestor, the Australopithecus, who had vocal tract anatomy and cerebral cortex similar to the chimps, too might have engaged in calls and drumbeats in social and non-referential contests.
It appears that our musical prowess might well have this heritage. Voice is then the oldest instrument. But sophistication in musical ability and experience has had to await the increase in the size and the lateral partitioning of the brain into the two hemispheres.
The palaeo-neurologist Dr. Harry Jerison of UCLA argues in his chapter in the book that musical experience is related to the lateralisation of the brain, which is not seen in other mammals, but only in us and in songbirds. Incidentally, other than us it is only some songbirds that seem to create tunes and sing just for the pleasure of it.
--D. Balasubramanian
University of St. Andrews, School of Psychology, Fife KY16 9JP, Scotland
Address for correspondence: W. Tecumseh Fitch, University of St. Andrews, School of Psychology, Fife KY16 9JP, Scotland. Voice: +44-1334-462054; fax: +44-1334-463042. wtsf@st-andrews.ac.uk
In this paper, I briefly review some comparative data that provide an empirical basis for research on the evolution of music making in humans. First, a brief comparison of music and language leads to discussion of design features of music, suggesting a deep connection between the biology of music and language. I then selectively review data on animal "music." Examining sound production in animals, we find examples of repeated convergent evolution or analogy (the evolution of vocal learning of complex songs in birds, whales, and seals). A fascinating but overlooked potential homology to instrumental music is provided by manual percussion in African apes. Such comparative behavioral data, combined with neuroscientific and developmental data, provide an important starting point for any hypothesis about how or why human music evolved. Regarding these functional and phylogenetic questions, I discuss some previously proposed functions of music, including Pinker's "cheesecake" hypothesis; Darwin's and others' sexual selection model; Dunbar's group "grooming" hypothesis; and Trehub's caregiving model. I conclude that only the last hypothesis receives strong support from currently available data. I end with a brief synopsis of Darwin's model of a songlike musical "protolanguage," concluding that Darwin's model is consistent with much of the available evidence concerning the evolution of both music and language. There is a rich future for empirical investigations of the evolution of music, both in investigations of individual differences among humans, and in interspecific investigations of musical abilities in other animals, especially those of our ape cousins, about which we know little.
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the astonishing thing isthat chimpanzees living freely and un- disturbed in the forest like to drum ...
Sound and Ritual- A Jackson
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Abstract Wild chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) produce low-frequency sounds by hitting the buttresses and/or trunks of trees. This buttress drumming occurs in discrete bouts that may be integrated into the phrase sequence of the chimpanzees long-distance vocalization, the pant hoot. The aim of this study was to investigate whether regional variation exists in the drumming behavior of male chimpanzees from Kibale National Park (Kanyawara community), Uganda, and Taï National Park, Ivory Coast. Recordings were made during a 6-month field season at Taï in 1990, and a 12-month field season at Kanyawara in 1996–1997. Acoustic analysis revealed the following: (1) Kanyawara males drummed significantly less frequently in conjunction with a pant hoot or hoot than did Taï males; (2) drumming bouts by Kanyawara males included significantly fewer beats, and were significantly shorter in duration, than those of Taï males; these differences disappeared when only those bouts produced in conjunction with a call were compared; (3) when Kanyawara chimpanzees did call and drum together, they tended to integrate drumming into the vocalization at a later point than did Taï males; and (4) individual differences in the temporal patterning of drumming bouts were not apparent for Kanyawara males, whereas a previous analysis revealed individual differences among Taï males.
DAvid Rothenburg writes:
Thousand-year old petroglyphs found in Russian Karelia may depict a man communicating sonically with beluga whales. Part of the traditional human way of living in a natural context includes the belief that all species listen to one another, and respond as they are designed to do. It is simply not true that animals only respond to their own songs. It has long been noted in Indonesia that after a concert of gamelan music, all the insects will sing in an especially synchronized manner. Cicadas will fly at a loud ring of a gong, a sound very different from the ones they make themselves. For centuries European bird trainers have known that bullfinches, who only make a faint whistle in the wild, can be trained to repeat any simple melody within a several octave range. Why do they have this ability which they only use in captivity? No one knows, but in Germany during the eighteenth and nineteenth century, there were numerous bullfinch "academies" where birds were taught to sing, and the best singers competed in public contests throughout the land. |
