Nature, a science series broadcast on the American network PBS, had an episode this last week on the origins of music and singing in human beings. The website for the episode can be found here:Song of the Earth.

Part of the episode included an interview with archeologist Graeme Lawson, who demonstrated a facsimile of an instrument dating back 30,000-40,000 thousand years. There's an online photo essay which includes Lawson's playing of the bone "flute" (though it's actually more like an oboe) as a streaming Real Audio file -- sounds pretty good, if you ask me. Maybe some folks here with more musical than I can figure out what sort of key and scale the instrument is tuned to.

While I enjoyed the program as a whole, I found that the emphesis was placed far too much on male-only singing -- tracing human song back to the songs of male whales, and birds (where males do all of the singing) and a bit less on the singing of gibbons, where males and females sing together. The conclusion drawn was that all human music derived from the instinctual need to defend territory and to attract a mate, drawing modern parralells with national anthems (territory) and how rock stars attract female groupies (sex).

I acknoledge that these two factors account for a lot of music's power, but not all of it. At the end of the hour, I found myself asking: "But what about our first exposure to music, as individuals -- the lullaby? Or what about using rhythmic chanting to do more than keep millitary armies marching in step -- what about Chanteys and Wauking songs?" Neither of these forms of music received a single mention...

In any case, I thought other Mudcatters would be interested.