[NewMusic] the high stuff (archaeomusicology)

[Matthew Goodheart]

On Jul 27, 2007, at 10:42 PM, barry threw wrote:
> If we are talking about evolution and the development of the ear, I
> think it would be safe to say that the ancestors of man probably did
> not spend a majority of their time around waterfalls.  Pointing out
> exceptions does not disprove a trend.

>> It's pretty amazing to think that when people first developed drums
>> they were producing frequencies that were never really heard in daily
>> life.


Okay, I'm not exactly sure what you're talking about- if you've spent  
time on this, please share what you've discovered, as I think this is  
really fascinating- hence another overly long and potentially boring  
post. What instruments are you referring to, and at what time period?  
In own admittedly limited research on this, this is what I've figured  
out:

First of all, to talk about the evolution of hearing, I'm wondering  
which particular "ancestors" you are referring to. For example, the  
Australopithicenes, who lived around 3 million years ago in east  
Africa in the Ethiopia, Tanzania etc. area, were the first to walk  
upright. They spent their time moving between savannah and forest:  
the forest tended to collect around rivers, which include waterfalls  
(the BBC documentary where I got some of this info has a big scene at  
a waterfall. . .), and since waterfalls create pools which are a good  
source of food, I would think it would be a place they would visit  
regularly. (Also, any large river produces pretty low frequencies,  
and these are pretty common to all periods of human history.) On the  
savannah, there were a number of large creatures, including  
Dinotherium, which were enormous elephant-like creatures. We  
certainly don't know what they sounded like, but I would guess that  
the chance that they produced very low sounds is pretty large, and  
the sounds they must have made while walking I imagine must have been  
pretty low and impressive. So right here are two daily and crucial  
elements of our evolutionary ancestor's world, and they both produce  
very low sounds, so I do not see how they could be considered  
"exceptions."

Secondly, there is the history of musical instruments, which is  
nebulous at best. Monkeys, for example, have been known to beat on  
hollow logs in a kind of call and response dialogue, often related to  
territory. So does this type of behavior predate humans as a species,  
and did the Australopithicenes have some form of proto-music? No way  
to say, really. There is one theory, which makes most sense to me,  
that percussion instruments have their origins in stone-tool making,  
since the process itself was "percussive." My guess (and it's only a  
guess) is that its use as an abstraction would roughly follow the  
rise of other forms of abstraction/representation in the paleolithic  
world (such as the proto-art figurines dating 500-300K years ago,  
where stones which, through some natural process seem to resemble a  
human figure, are then modified in some way- though of course there  
are raging controversies surrounding these things. . .). It is hard  
to know what types of wood or stone or anything else would have been  
"played"- the Baka, for example, do "water drumming" (http:// 
web.ukonline.co.uk/baka/water_drumming.htm) - evidence for other  
instruments are flutes from around 35K years ago (there's a possible  
Neanderthal flute from around 60k, but it's under dispute), the  
possible picture of a musical bow from Ariège  around 15K years ago.  
Pottery, which may be used as a percussion instrument, was invented  
(3 separate times) around 12K ago.  The first membranophones that we  
know of, on the other hand, are from pictures of frame drums from the  
Catalhoyuk settlement in Anatolia around 8-10K years ago (again,  
there's some dispute about this), and definite depictions from Ur  
from around 4K years ago- so membrane-drums are relative late-comers  
in human musical history, and depictions of them, at least, are  
associated with human settlement and early civilizations, possibly  
even with the rise of agriculture- raising the interesting question  
of native american frame drums: what was the dissemination? Did they  
go from the middle-east proto-civilizations to asian hunter- 
gatherers, or vice-versa, or some other source? There must be a  
dissertation on this somewhere . . . On a side note, some accounts  
have the frame drum (played almost exclusively by women in the  
ancient middle-east) being used specifically for the replication of  
thunder.

So at all periods of instrument invention (as far as I can tell)  
people were around low frequency sounds in their daily environment-  
especially the rivers, waterfalls, the ocean, and large animals- all  
important sources of food in pre-history. Were the low sounds as  
common as mid- to high- range sounds? Well, no, but I would hardly  
say they were "never really heard in daily life."  Secondly, most pre- 
historical instruments (flute, musical bow) produce mid- and high-  
range frequencies. Log drums which could produce lower frequencies  
could be pretty early, but again nothing much lower than either their  
typical environment- 5 minutes in the backyard thwacking a bunch of  
random tree branches quickly produced a D3 [146 hz]- any folks who  
regularly used wood would easily encounter much lower frequencies.

mg