Music and cavemen?

[Gruuberhans]

Hello people. There's something a bit funny I've been thinking about lately, regarding the way we hear music as opposed to "just sound".
I've heard a few times that music is something only humans can understand, which appears to be completely false, as I've seen parrots
whistling excerpts of Mozart pieces and whatnot... But this lead me to a very interesting question:

Would the first homo sapiens (about 200,000 years ago) be able to understand the melodies of modern music? Think especially about jazz and similar genres that are sort of "advanced" in melody if you know what i mean.


I don't know excatly what I think, but let's make a comparison to make this more discussable. Just like technology, music has developed over time, but if you take a baby from a hospital in 2010, go back to approximately 200,000 BC and leave it there, that probably doesn't mean that it's gonna have any understanding of technology that didn't exist back then, unless the theory of genetic memory (lol Assassins Creed) is legitimate.

Discuss!

 

[Glitchfinder]

I think that the concept of music is so varied among modern day humans that if you took it back to early Homo Sapiens (which did not exist 200,000 years ago. Other human races and precursors to human races did exist, however), you would find that they would probably consider it a very loud, very annoying noise.

Now, what I'm saying will be difficult for someone to understand, if they've never been taken on a tour of what the globe does and has considered music. For example, I've heard a piece recorded in a mail sorting post in Africa, that, as far as I was concerned, had everything required to be a good piece. However, when the people who were recorded were asked about it, they laughed at the person and told him that it wasn't music, and invited him to hear music with them.

Alternatively, you could look up classical Japanese pieces. I recommend that because, if you get the genuine stuff, it almost certainly won't sound like music to someone with western perceptions of music. Simply put, classical Japanese pieces employ the concept of silence as a sound, and try to reach a balance between silence and noise. Don't understand what I'm saying? Then look it up.

Basically, what I'm trying to tell you is that what you consider music is probably the western variety, with a clear beat, rhythm, and often vocals that will be recognizable. In fact, you probably aren't even that used to vocables, which are nonsense syllables used in music in a lot of cultures. (Think "la la la la la", only with a lot more variety, tone, etc.) A good example of vocables would be in classic Native American music. In most cases, that singing isn't actually language. It's much closer to being an equivalent of speaking in tongues.

 

[EnderX]

Let us not forget the timeflow changes on that. I had this discussion once with a musician; he pointed out that those in our own 'Western World' just a few centuries ago wouldn't necessarily have recognized as 'music' what we put forth (not a commentary on pop music - he was actually speaking about hymns at the time), and made note that the same holds true - we probably wouldn't recognize what they considered music to be 'musical' by our own lights.

 

[Juan J. Sánchez]

I think that the concept of music is so varied among modern day humans that if you took it back to early Homo Sapiens (which did not exist 200,000 years ago. Other human races and precursors to human races did exist, however), you would find that they would probably consider it a very loud, very annoying noise.

Glitch, I find modern day music a loud, very annoying noise. I'm an amateur classical pianist. I remember I once read an article about the theory of music in piano classes a few years ago, and the article said that the main difference between music and noise was the appearance of patterns and order in music, as opposed to noise. Tempo, for instance, gives sound a rhythm. A key provides a specific set of pitches or frequencies to work with. These concepts apply to most modern day music. Rock and roll, in example, tends to be written in C major key and a 4-beat tempo.

There are exceptions. A friend once told me Aphex Twin decomposes images in his PC as noise, which he adds into his songs. That is to say, I think over the last century we've lost the ability to clearly distinguish what is music and what is noise. That's why I stick to classical. I definitely know Rachmaninoff's Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini is music.