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The Origin of Music

The Origin of Music

Robert C. Ehle
Copyright: © 2018 |Pages: 15
ISBN13: 9781522553328|ISBN10: 1522553320|EISBN13: 9781522553335
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-5225-5332-8.ch003
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MLA

Ehle, Robert C. "The Origin of Music." Visual Approaches to Cognitive Education With Technology Integration, edited by Anna Ursyn, IGI Global, 2018, pp. 36-50. https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-5225-5332-8.ch003

APA

Ehle, R. C. (2018). The Origin of Music. In A. Ursyn (Ed.), Visual Approaches to Cognitive Education With Technology Integration (pp. 36-50). IGI Global. https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-5225-5332-8.ch003

Chicago

Ehle, Robert C. "The Origin of Music." In Visual Approaches to Cognitive Education With Technology Integration, edited by Anna Ursyn, 36-50. Hershey, PA: IGI Global, 2018. https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-5225-5332-8.ch003

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Abstract

This chapter offers the author's theory of the origins of music in ancient primates a million years ago, and how would music have sounded like. Origins of nasal and tone languages and the anatomy of larynx is discussed, and then a hypothesis is presented that these creatures would fashioned a tone language, they had absolute pitch that allowed them to recognize each other voices and to read each other's emotions from the sounds they made with their voices, and to convey specific information about strategies, meeting places, etc. over these distances. Having an acute sense of pitch, they would have sung, essentially using tonal language for aesthetic and subjective purposes. Thus, they would have invented music. Then the physicality of the human (or hominid) voice is discussed and the way an absolute pitch can be acquired, as the musicality still lies in the vocalisms it expresses. The reason for this is that music is actually contained in the way the brain works, and the ear and the voice are parts of this system.

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