Neandertal anti-defamation files, 19
I pass this along without comment:
“Rap is associated with a particular type of music based on words and phrases, something the Neanderthals lacked,” [Steven] Mithen said.
Haters will be hatin'
music
A, C, and G, sure, but what's T?
A Sunday science story from last week: "Choir to sing the 'code of life.'"
Scientists and composers have produced a new choral work in which performers sing parts of their own genetic code.
Human DNA is made up of just four different chemical compounds, which gave musician Andrew Morley the idea of assigning a note to each of them.
The new piece, Allele, will be performed by the New London Chamber Choir at the Royal Society of Medicine on 13 July.
My first reaction was to think that this would be the most awful song ever. But it depends a lot on which part of the DNA they choose. They could pick some repetitive element, where different people have different lengths, which might end up sort of like a round. And of course most of the people will have the same sequence most of the time, so there will be relatively little discordance -- and the choice of musical encoding will make a difference to how variation sounds.
Maybe they can just encode the bases as the notes of a major chord and BLAST for a sequence that corresponds to "Taps."
Members of the 40-strong choir are all participants in a scientific study.
Each of them has had his or her DNA decoded in order to see what it is genetically that distinguishes great singers from the rest of us.
But then one starts to wonder what it actually means to have your sequence in a song. For most parts of our DNA, we have two -- are they picking one? Are they singing genotypes? What's the deal? If they're "participants in a study" looking for singing genes, I suppose the data are SNP genotypes. Those would be pretty misleading as a basis for singing "sequences."
What a mess. But I'm sure that the audience will be appropriately beard-stroking in their appreciation.
Mailbag: Music and language
Question:
A couple of years back, there started a discussion of the "foxp2" gene
affecting speech. Regardless of the nature of whatever constellation
of genes allows human speech, is it reasonable to extrapolate that this
constellation also allows what we humans call "music". That is, music
and speech are both approximately equally rich devices for conveying
information, probably use the same parts of the body and brain, and
have similar adaptive rationales. Some languages, perhaps all languages,
convey meaning with tone sequences.I can imagine writing a computer program which would translate music
into (unrecognizable?) speech, and vice versa.I don't know if you've heard of Chuck Snowdon's work, he's in Madison in the Psych department. He and a collaborator who is a cellist and composer put together an interesting study with tamarins.
Tamarins make different vocalizations in different contexts -- characteristic of their emotional state -- excited versus calm, anxious, etc. Chuck's collaborator composed "music" that follows the prosody patterns of these tamarin vocalizations. He then played the music on the cello and resampled the frequencies to match the tamarin vocal range -- basically raising the notes two and a half octaves.
They found that when they played the music to the tamarins, it elicited the appropriate responses -- in other words, they developed a musical analog of tamarin communication. The implication is that human music may elicit emotional responses in similar ways because of its similarities to human vocalizations.
Now the question is whether language is connected to this. Musical compositions often have a hierarchical structure and repeated elements, much like language. It seems plausible to me that the ability to make music may have much in common with language. So maybe a "translator" from one to the other might yield interesting results.
Orangutan music
One step closer to Ewoks:
Kiss squeaks come in three different forms: unaided (lips only); with the hand in front of the lips; and with leaves in front of the lips. The leaves are stripped off a twig and held in a bundle in front of the orangutan's mouth while the animal makes the kiss squeak.
When scientists first observed this behavior, they weren't sure exactly why the orangutans used the leaves. The new study suggests that the tool lowers the frequency of the kiss squeak, making the orangutan producing the call sound bigger to their potential predator.
OK, it's hardly "music" -- it's on the order of chimpanzee leaf sponges in terms of complexity. Kind of an ape kazoo.
Aurignacian happy hours
That image conjured by John Noble Wilford just had me tickled:
It so happens, as Dr. Conard and his co-authors, Susanne C. Münzel of Tubingen and Maria Malina of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences, noted, the Hohle Fels flute was uncovered in sediments a few feet away from the carved figurine of a busty, nude woman, also around 35,000 years old. The discovery was announced in May by Dr. Conard.
Was this evidence of happy hours after the hunt? Fertility rites or social bonding? The German archaeologists suggested that music in the Stone Age “could have contributed to the maintenance of larger social networks, and thereby perhaps have helped facilitate the demographic and territorial expansion of modern humans.”
The description of the flutes is available in advance copy from Nature. This is one of my pet peeves -- papers in advance of print -- because I can't just enter them into my bibliographic database; there are no volume or page numbers. What a pain.
Mammoth ivory flutes were really hard to make.
The characteristics of these three fragments of ivory are known only from the ivory flute from the upper Aurignacian deposits of Geienklösterle archaeological horizon II (ref. 15). The technology for making an ivory flute is much more complicated than that for making a flute from a bird bone. It requires forming the rough shape along the long axis of a naturally curved piece of mammoth ivory, splitting it open at the interface of the cementum and dentine or along one of the other bedding plains in the ivory, carefully hollowing out the halves, carving the holes and then rejoining the halves of the flute with air-tight seals along the seams that connected the halves of the flute. The ivory flute from Geienklösterle preserves dozens of finely carved notches along the edges of the two halves to facilitate binding and sealing the flute (15). Although thousands of pieces of ivory-working debris and hundreds of ivory artefacts have been recovered from the Aurignacian deposits of Hohle Fels, Vogelherd and Geienklösterle, only the flute fragments have the form described above and preserve a hollowed-out convex morphology, finger holes and series of notches along the edge of the long axis. Thus, we can be confident that these finds represent fragments of ivory flutes similar to the one recovered from Geienklösterle. We recovered the ivory flute from Geienklösterle in 31 small fragments. Given the tendency of delicate ivory artefacts to break into many pieces, it is not unusual to find such pieces in isolation.
The tiny (~1 cm) fragments don't look like much by themselves. Several of them were found only by water screening of sediments. Much more than the "origin of music" angle, I think the attention of Conard's team is the real story here. They had an inkling what to look for, and they started finding the pieces. I wonder how many others may be floating around unrecognized within Upper Paleolithic collections. The thing working against a lot of unrecognized tiny flute fragments is that the Swabian sites seem to have involved dedicated ivory working on a scale that doesn't appear elsewhere.
The flutes made of bird bone are much simpler to manufacture and interpret.
The maker of the flute carved the instrument from the radius of a griffon vulture (Gyps fulvus). This species has a wing span of between 230 and 265 cm and provides bones ideal for large flutes. Griffon vultures and other vultures are documented in the Upper Palaeolithic sediments of the Swabian caves with several examples identified from Gravettian and Aurignacian deposits at Geissenklösterle.
The Geissenklösterle flute has previously been modeled to evaluate its sound characteristics; this has not been done for the new flutes:
The smaller, three-holed bone flute, made from the radius of a swan, that was recovered from the Aurignacian deposits of archaeological horizon II at the nearby cave of Geienklösterle can be played by blowing obliquely into its proximal end to produce four basic notes (10, 11, 12, 13). Three additional overtones can be produced by blowing more sharply into the flute. Given that the three-holed flute from Geienklösterle produces a range of notes comparable to many modern kinds of flute, we expect flute 1 from Hohle Fels to provide a comparable, or perhaps greater, range of notes and musical possibilities (14).
I for one am tired of the boring New-Agey flute music that has been creeping into documentaries about ancient people. So I hope that somebody out there will think a little more broadly about the kind of musical environment these flutes were part of. There would have been a huge potential variety of percussion artifacts. Singing and clapping. Probably not strings, although as long as we're going to talk seriously about arrows in the Upper Paleolithic, a good bowstring has a nice pluck to it.
Now if you're a composer of documentary caveman music, you don't want to take this too far. And by "too far", I mean Ewok celebration from Return of the Jedi "too far." That would not be my idea of a "happy hour." Kapiche?
References:
Conard NJ, Malina M, Münzel SC. 2009. New flutes document the earliest musical tradition in southwestern Germany. Nature (advance online) doi:10.1038/nature08169
The Darwinian serenade
Jennifer Viegas writes about historical research into Darwin's home life and the role of Emma Darwin's music in Darwin's career.
In "The Descent of Man," Darwin wrote, "I conclude that musical notes and rhythm were first acquired by the male or female progenitors of mankind for the sake of charming the opposite sex."
Derry added, "Darwin's idea was that the organs for sound production in early humans could have been precursory to more complex verbal communication, namely language."
The article throws in a few unrelated things, too, but it's interesting to read.
Making beautiful grunting, er, music together
A recent BBC story described one musician's attempt to recreate the "Neandertal" musical experience:
A musical experience with a difference is being previewed at the National Museum Wales in Cardiff - an attempt to recreate the sound of the Neanderthals.
Jazz composer Simon Thorne was given the task of creating the "soundscape" to provide a musical backdrop to some of the ancient exhibits on display.
The musician says the work is "probably the most unusual" he has undertaken.
There's an MP3 at the link, and I can say, it is indeed most unusual. It sounds like three dudes speaking Klingon at the other end of a storm sewer. It's so unpleasant that Gretchen asked me to turn it off and use the headphones instead!
Well, nothing against Thorne -- who it seems to me was given an impossible task -- but this is some fugly music. I suppose that's the point, to make the museum visitors feel like they're in an alien environment.
I mean, suppose Neandertal music sounded like a blend of "O Danny Boy" and "How Great Thou Art"? OK, so that would work out great for the Ken Burns Neandertal special. But it wouldn't have that air of mystery. As in, "Sweet Mystery of Life At Last I've Found Thee..."
If you ask me, any serious analysis of Neandertal music has to grapple with the findings of the classic master, discoverer of the Neandertal tuba, Oscar Todkopf:
Todkopf theorizes that the Neanderthals' fondness for music may explain why they vanished some 30,000 years ago. "Maybe their music scared away all the game. They would have produced an awful racket oompah-pahing all over the place. The Neander Valley was alive with the sound of music."
Yep. Well, the current composition does seem to have the "oompah-pahing" covered.
Paleolithic multimedia
A trained vocalist was sent through the caves testing different sounds and pitches in various locations. Spots of maximum resonance, or places where the voice was most amplified and clear, were noted in each section and later laid over a map of the cave drawings.
The vast majority of the paintings, up to 90 percent in some cases, were located directly at, or very near, the spots where the acoustics were the absolute best, they found.
The work is by Iegor Reznikoff, no publication yet.
Neandertals
For years, I've worked on their bones. Now I'm working on their genes. Read more about the science studying these ancient people.
Denisova
From a finger bone of an ancient human came the record of a completely unexpected population. My lab is working on the science of the Denisova genome.
Acceleration
The advent of agriculture caused natural selection to speed up greatly in humans. We're uncovering some of the ways that populations have rapidly changed during the last 10,000 years.
Malapa
Just outside Johannesburg, the Malapa site is producing some of the most exciting finds in human evolution. This site is the headquarters of the Malapa Soft Tissue Project.