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Music may predate humans

How much older than these 4,000 - 53,000-year-old flutes is music? (Pic: Jelle Atema)

Similarities between the music of humans and other animals add weight to the idea that music has been around longer than human language, and maybe even longer than humans, say US researchers.

Patricia M. Gray of the National Academy of Sciences in Washington and colleagues have published an analysis of the similarities between the music of humans, whales and birds in this week's Science.

"The roots of music lie closer to our ancient lizard brain than to our more recent reasoning cortex," they argue.

Gray and colleagues document that whale song has a similar structure to human song, using repetition, similar rhythms, intervals, phrase and song durations, and pleasant tones.

All this, they add, when whales could just as easily formulate free-form, arrhythmic and non-repeating tunes using 'unpleasant' roars, stutters and grunts.

"The fact that whale and human music have so much in common even though our evolutionary paths have not intersected for 60 million years, suggests that music may predate humans - that rather than being the inventors of music, we are latecomers to the musical scene," write Gray and colleagues.

They found bird song too had fascinating parallels with human music - one bird song even sounds like the opening of Chopin's "Revolutionary" Etude.

While some birds sing Western music scales, others sing pentatonic scales - which consist of five different tones within the octave and are more common in African and Eastern music.

"There are interval inversions, simple harmonic relations, and retention of melody with change of key," write the researchers. "Many birds transpose motifs to different keys."

Some birds also practice "call and response" song patterns - a technique often used in gospel music. The Californian marsh wren, for example, may sing as many as 120 different themes in a fixed sequence while a neighbour responds identically to each theme.

Other birds use "instruments" to produce music. The palm cockatoo of Northern Australia and New Guinea, for example, makes drumsticks from a tree twig and uses a hollow log as a drum.

Like humans, the ability to memorise and recognise musical patterns is central to the music making of birds and whales. Tunes are passed on from parent to offspring, from adults to unrelated younger generations, and between peers.

The authors point to the "extraordinary finding" last year that humpback whales from Australia's east coast ditched their own song in favour of that of a few newcomers from the west coast.

Evidence of human music dates back to flutes which demonstrate that Neanderthal civilisations devoted considerable time and skill to constructing complicated musical instruments.

"Given the sophistication of these 50,000-year-old instruments, it is quite possible that humans have been making music for several hundred thousand years," write Gray and colleagues.

"Human music-making may vary dramatically between cultures, but the fact that it is found in all cultures suggests that there is a deep human need to create, perform, and listen to music," the researchers write. "If it is as ancient as some believe, this could explain why we find so much meaning and emotion in music even though we cannot explain why it makes us feel the way it does."