Music and Song, Evolutionary Approaches to

New research methods have during the last thirty years focused increased attention on the role of music in culture and its place in the field of anthropology. One model of the evolution of human communication proposes that song may have been the precursor of language. Musical communication may have been the means by which the vocal instrument attained the capacity for the fine‐tuned acoustic productivity necessary for the development of language. But music is still with us, both in its vocal form and in performance on the wide variety of musical instruments that human ingenuity has devised from available resources in the different environments that our species adapted to occupy. Whether through singing, playing, or a combination of the two, humans make music for a variety of purposes across the life cycle: social ceremonies, calming, arousing and healing, commemoration of predecessors, civic events. Music helps to define who we are

Acoustics · Aesthetics · Art · Epistemology · Human language · Ingenuity · Linguistics · Musical · Singing · Visual arts · Animal Vocal Communication and Behavior · Communication · Computer Science · Diverse Musicological Studies · History · Psychology · Artificial Intelligence

• The Prehistory of Music

  Iain Morley•The Prehistory of Music•2013

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