Music: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

(Credit: Zarya Maxim Alexandrovich/Shutterstock) Our lives are awash in tunes. Songs are blasted through the radio, piped into supermarkets, they waft through the air at public gatherings and soundtracks can make or break a blockbuster movie. Humans seem obsessed with melody and rhythm. But when did it begin in hominin history? What purpose does it fulfill? And does music have a dark side? The first bands started gigging at least tens of thousands of years. Archaeologists have found 40,000-year-old flutes carved from bird bones. The specimens’ craftsmanship suggests that hundreds of years of proto flutes must have been made, either of bone or organic materials (reeds, grasses or wood that has not survived), says Jeremy Montagu, an ethno-organologist, or expert in musical instruments, at the University of Oxford. He is author of an article on the genesis of music published this month in the online journal Frontiers in Sociology. Montagu ...