Mamta Nainy is a writer based in New Delhi. She has authored over thirty-five books for children, many of which have won national and international awards, including Valley of Words Awards 2022, FICCI Publishing Awards 2022, Publishing Next Award 2022, The Hindu Young World-Goodbooks Award 2019 and Peek-a-Book Children's Choice Award 2019. She also works as a literary translator, translating between Hindi and English. She is inspired by the boundless imagination of children and loves to travel but is often too lazy to do so-so she mostly makes do with reading.
On a late-summer evening, as dusk slowly settled over a prehistoric valley, the sky shifted in colour. A group of early humans sat beneath an ancient tree near a cluster of caves by a river meandering through the valley. A meadow grasshopper buzzed in a weed clump; a melodious cricket chirped in the grass; a cicada filled the valley with its shrill, sustained songs; and a lone bird serenaded with its joyous tunes of homecoming. Imitating the sounds they heard, the early humans joined this grand orchestra and the musical extravaganza took an entirely different turn!
Beginnings have often been a matter of contestation-there is no history still that can establish the beginning of time. The same holds true for the origin of music. Though it would be fair to say that if one thinks of the history of humanity as one day, then music has existed since the dawn of that day. There is no way of knowing who sang the first song, whistled the first tune, or made the first rhythmic sounds that resembled what we know today as music. But undoubtedly it happened thousands of years ago.
Early humans may have sung as long as they could speak, though they likely did not croon full-length songs. Instead, it is conjectured that they made simpler vocal sounds, mostly imitations of sounds in nature and shared similar tonality, patterns and repetitions to those sounds. When the wind howled, they howled back; when it rained, they hummed along; and when they hunted, they mimicked animal sounds. According to historians, this earliest form of music, called the prehistoric era of music, was produced between 50,000 BCE and 4000 BCE and was primarily vocal-the early humans either hummed, whistled, clicked or grunted.
Soon, early humans realized that their bodies could become instruments to create music and were mediums for performance. They created rhythm by clapping, pounding, thumping, walking and running. With rituals at the heart of their song and dance, early humans sang prayers and made offerings to the elements of nature. Eventually, they invented musical instruments to produce the sounds they could not-pipes and flutes mimicked the wind, whistles and rattles imitated birds and drums and gongs amplified the sound of the heartbeat. How do we know this? Through numerous archaeological finds of bone flutes, pipes and whistles-objects fashioned from animal bones that are meant to be blown into. One of the oldest bone flutes, found by archaeologists in a Slovenian cave and dating back at least 45,000 years, is made from the femur bone of a bear cub. It even has holes punched into its sides, allowing the musical pitch to be raised or lowered by covering one or more of these holes!
Over time, music transformed as it changed hands (or mouths). With the development of written language in 4000 BCE, music evolved from random sounds and pitches to conscious melodies and patterns. As it grew more complex, people began to codify it.
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