Let's talk music, no genre boundaries

@audio-b-dog 

I often wonder what the earliest music must have sounded like. I assume it had a strong beat and the melody from a flute or whatever was less important than it is today

The first nations people of Australia seem to have a continuous culture extending back at least 65,000 years.  Their songlines are a form of oral history documented in dance formations and storytelling.  Remarkably, they include a narrative of the end of the last major ice-age about 12,000 years ago, when sea levels rose by several hundred feet as ice sheets melted.  The shoreline swallowed large tracts of land, and allowed the Great Barrier Reef to form.  In North America the Great Lakes formed at this time from the remnant fresh water from melting glaciers. This period marked the first cultivation of plants by humans.

Most likely the earliest musical instruments go back at least 40,000 years and included two clapsticks beaten together, plus hollowed out tree branches - the didgeridoo. Ants do a good job of hollowing gum tree branches.

Didgeridoo players can breathe continuously into the instrument while 'talking' to create an incredible variety of sounds.  Clapsticks (hundreds of them) and didgeridoo featured in the opening work of the refurbished Sydney Opera House, in "Of the Earth" by Willian Barton. I cannot conceive how music for the didgeridoo can be written down!

Unfortunately archeological evidence of very early instruments may be restricted to rock paintings, as the instruments were made of perishable materials.

I think human music began with mothers singing to babies and surrounding family creating rhythm with hand claps. Other melodic and rhythmic sound making methods evolved from that.

But the birds were already singing in a rhythmic way. 

Very important observation about breathing and non written music... breath is a gesture as is speech or playing an instrument... Some gesture can be written some others not, the flow in time and his cycles created a time dimension proper to music and not to metronome measured by the clock time...

I own 20 albums of didgeridoo, not one is like an other...

This music may be very powerful...

Didgeridoo players can breathe continuously into the instrument while ’talking’ to create an incredible variety of sounds.  Clapsticks (hundreds of them) and didgeridoo featured in the opening work of the refurbished Sydney Opera House, in "Of the Earth" by Willian Barton. I cannot conceive how music for the didgeridoo can be written down!

Women sing for the child even before birth...

It is women that create humor to control the male hubris, the women were center to the social net, and they  co-create speech which is music with the hunting male group imitating animals and communicating between them...

 S. Pinker once said that music was secondary...

https://iai.tv/articles/pinker-vs-nietzsche-is-music-the-basis-of-language-auid-3247

Nietszche said the opposite...

 He was right and this explain why i never read Pinker...

Music and linguistics are linked if we think about language origin and more so if we observe the hidden iceberg part : the motivation of sounds...The sound signs are not absolutely arbitrary,Saussure for methodological reason establishes  the arbitrary of sounds system as starting point. Others linguists takes this further and posed it as a dogma...They are wrong..

But it is another story...

I am interested by linguistics too and especially by the differences between oral first cultures and the invention of written signs and after it by the huge abyss of the Greek alphabet created and its impact on Greek thought ...Not just music and acoustics...

@audio-b-dog - "No way is that jazz" is what a lot of purists said about Miles Davis' music starting with 'In A Silent Way, and continuing with 'Bitches Brew' on onward... That's the only kind of 'jazz' that I happen to like, too... So Van can be jazz...