How old is Singing.?
20,000yrs..? 50,000yrs?
Truth is nobody knows, but we have a friend who came upon a bone flute in Slovenia thought to be 40,000yrs old. If you've ever tried playing the flute you'd soon figure it a lot more complex than singing.. which kinda tells how singing is older than 40,000yrs and do I mean by a lot, like 200,000yrs. So, let's be reasonable and say singing is likely 250,000 yrs old.
Now--no---I'm not about to suggest this is the reason Wellington's Orpheus choir :-) was not only the first in the world to sing Requiem in commemoration first anniversary 9/11 and to do so more than willingly and handsomely in congregant-to-cathedral (art) style [truth is I can't be sure NZ's been above the waterline all that time, tho I could assert quite fairly that this choir's voices did not sound fishy--not one bit!!)
Okay, back to the serious stuff now, this is a science thing, a cognitive science thing.. And specifically whether we humans are 'hardwired' for singing or find it acquired? Not a bad question, huh, specially when guys like Stevie Pinker pop the oral---music is 'auditory cheesecake' and we get out kicks from it by way an auditory system and brain evolved for other reasons. Yeah, that's what he said, and it's not too polemic to say in response he's hollering the obvious into that big time lag we know so little about in where exactly skills, sensitivities and so on fitted in whatever sequence makes for evolution anyways. Then again lets be charitable--is he saying hardwired for something else got left behind and the new deal is whatta we gotta today? If he is then he'll get on well with David Huron
So much for argument.. next the science and Laurel Trainor
Which for this kind of thing does not need the musical. It does need the amusical. Why? Because the purpose of the science is to find that link between response and auditory input. And the way to design this is through music structure. Specifically used were 'pitch'(high/low frequency) and 'pitch interval' (the difference twixt high & low. So, Laurel studied subjects listening to auditory patterns containing both properties and observed Event-Related brain Potentials(ERPs). These potentials show the brain registering differences between expected stimulus and the unexpected one heard. For non-musicians the results show how encoding of the sound properties(pitch and pitch interval) is automatic.
All to do with your physiology folks. Music's connoiseurs know the influence on psyche and emotions of musical content: with it go physiological reactions like BP, breathing, temperature, and at a 'higher level', tears, 'lump' in the throat, shivers. And now, wouldn't you know hitech's in the act--neuro-imaging with MRI shows increased activity in brain areas accompany positive emotive experience..
Bye for now -jsp--