What Did Prehistoric Music Sound Like?
What Did Prehistoric Music Sound Like?
The Beginning
It began spontaneously almost unconsciously while they painted their cave walls which were their natural habitat at the time. It was a perfect tuneful heartwarming gentle throbbing. It sounded mysterious, foreboding the depth of an unexplored world of adventure lost in a vast primeval forest 10,000 years ago.
This is what music sounded like in Prehistoric times. Prehistoric music means all music produced in preliterate cultures beginning somewhere in very late geological history. It is hard to believe that music was flourishing before Mozart, Beethoven and the Beetles. The great Composers’ earliest ancestors were playing musical instruments and showing artistic creativity more than 40,000 years ago, studies have shown. So, the idea of music is not new to man and animals alike.
Survival Music
Music performs all different functions in our world. To man it is an avenue for him to express his deepest emotion. On the other hand, for animals it was a means of finding sex mates. However, then music was a means of survival as the cavemen used it to communicate to each other. Prehistoric men who lived in Europe during the Upper Paleolithic from 10,000 to 40,000 years ago spent a lot of time in caves often camping there for short periods since they were nomadic hunters and gatherers. Now imagine being in a cave that is so dark you couldn’t see the next person because the light was so dull and due to narrow passages couldn’t be carried through either.. This was the natural surroundings of the cavemen at that time and as such they needed a way to communicate and music was a perfect means. So they had to use their voices to explore the crooks and crannies of their surroundings.
Earliest Instrument
Although the human voice is regarded as the earliest musical instrument, evidence of certain musical instrument was unearthed in Germany in the form of primitive flutes made from bird bones and mammoth ivory. Also, they carved musical instrument from cave bears and mammoth tusks which generated a deep humming tones which created an eerie sound kind of music low tone with moving unstructured rhythms.
Analysis Today
It's impossible to fine caveman music without interpretation today for obvious reasons. Here are a few modernized takes on what it could have sounded like.
Prehistoric music sounds like you are in the wild, walking alone away from time itself, distractions, anxiety, stress of life and trouble with nothing but you and the wild calmly gliding into a world where your brain is not running a hundred mile an hour. But how could we really know any of this? It is all educated guesses based on the information we have. There are no recordings from back then, so all we have is some of our colorful thoughts and deep imagination.
Steemians, what do you think Prehistoric music sounds like? I might try making a track that's inspired by these sounds.
i listened to an antique flute in an music healing workshop i've been last year.
all the instruments, all the drums are fallowing the heart rhythm, the ancestral beat for calling people in.
i don't agree with your last part. although i don't have an musical background, but i think that they did have real fears of being hunted by other animals. they were not just walking alone in the wild carefree. there sounds were designed to fight, to attack, like a signal they made to predate or defense.
looking forward for your next post :) i like your subjects :))