# Origin of musicality?



## Joris

This is an heavily debated question, but where do you think musicality originates from, not as a 'talent' per se, but more in general?


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## zachybinx

Wow. If I had to take a guess it would probably be a combination of vocal and percussive expressions in our lonnngg lost evolutionary ancesters. not necessarily "music." probably vocal first... location wise- probably where ever humans originated from. is this what you mean? It was likely something that developed at a snails pace over 1000's of years.


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## Guest

I'd say the origin of musicality developed out of the ability for our distant ancestors to distinguish sounds as being either "signals" (danger, pain...) or "just sounds that don't need to worry us" (wind rustling the leaves, babies cooing, somebody farting, etc.) leading, eventually, to a contemplation of them for their sonic qualities that we found pleasing to our ears.
Then somebody noticed that the wind causing hollow wood to strike against a neighboring solid object caused a resonance of some sort and hey presto - musicality!!
OK, I'll put that joint out now...


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## EdwardBast

I would guess it is largely parasitic on the apparatus for the production and processing of speech. Pitch distinctions are essential to vocal inflections coding emotion and, for example, declarative versus interrogative statements. In tonal languages, like a number of Asian tongues, they are often critically implicated in meaning and hence, presumably, the extraordinary prevalence of perfect pitch among their speakers. Tonal and modal systems with pitch and/or harmonic hierarchies allow the neat division of musical utterances into analogs of phrases, clauses, sentences or periods and paragraphs, through the deployment of half and full cadences; It is no coincidence that music theorists use these terms for divisions of musical structure.


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## millionrainbows

Yeah, speech. It came from sustaining a pitch, or "singing". Like "Ooooooommmmm…" It is spiritual, it centers us, it takes away fear. Lullabyes were probably in there at first. It is love. It is a mother's love for her baby, sung as a lullabye. Men probably learned to sing in order to aid in war.

But it all goes back to vibration; the vibration of THE BIG NOTE as Frank Zappa called it. We sing in order to resonate sympathetically with the world, and the universe. We are vibrations.


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## Taggart

Interestingly, but not surprisingly, we seem to be concentrating on the music side of musicality rather than the movement or dance side. One of the other big uses of music is to co-ordinate movement either as dance or as work songs. Even simple things like a drum beat to control the speed of the rowers represents musicality - the ability to pick out and respond to a given rhythm.


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## Woodduck

Taggart said:


> Interestingly, but not surprisingly, we seem to be concentrating on the music side of musicality rather than the movement or dance side.


Good to recall our Western bias. Once the possibilities of harmony opened up in Western music, rhythm got subordinated to it, both in practice and in theory. We use "music theory" as a term nearly synonymous with "harmony," and tend to discuss the harmonic structure of music without reference to rhythm, as if rhythm is just a ticking clock against which melodic and harmonic events transpire. But rhythm in music isn't just pulse; it's the whole structuring of sound in time. Speech itself has rhythm as well as pitch, and the duration and temporal placement of pitches in speech is essential to the conveyance of meaning. It only takes a little sensing, and then stylizing, of the pitch+rhythm structure of speech to produce song; children begin doing it early, and I suspect the human race did too.


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## millionrainbows

In the beginning was the beat; and God said, "Let there be a blistering electric guitar solo," and there was a blistering electric guitar solo..


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## millionrainbows

Rhythm is rhythm; it usually involves hitting something. Men are good at hitting things. Rhythm is a separate category from sustained pitch. 

Sustained pitch is what I consider to be the true essence of music as a spiritual expression of being. Sustained pitch is singing. Singing is what you do to nurture and protect babies, and center yourself. Singing is for babies and women.

Our hearts beat; we walk. That's rhythm. That is movement, and being in time, as time passes. The heart beats to pump blood. We walk because we are mechanical. Rhythm is about time, and space covered in that time, and work done in that time. It is so practical. We are on the hunt. We walk in rhythm. We stalk our prey.

But singing, a sustained pitch, is really the essence of music, because it occurs in an instant and stays on as a vertical "nowness" which exists in the moment. Pitch is being "in" the moment of now.

A beat? One beat is an event. It is a singularity without meaning. It does not sustain. It dies out, and is gone. The only way a beat or "rhythm" can have meaning is if it continues as a series of occurrences, which form a line, or narrative.

Not so with pitch. Once a sustained note is sounded, it continues in the now. It needs no narrative to convey its essential meaning. It does not need the repetition of rhythm to give it meaning.

If you think sustained pitch "needs" the repetition of rhythm, as a narrative series of repeats, in order to survive and have meaning, then you are basically being utilitarian and practical. You are moving forward in time. You are doing something. You are useful. You are repeating. You are surviving. You are working . You are practical. You have rhythm. You are ego.

But if you think sustained pitch exists independently of rhythm, then you are engaged in something of stillness. You are the preserver. Stillness is useless. It does not capture animals to eat. Uselessness is art. Art is useless. The spirit is useless. Pitch is a concept. Concepts are useless.

Rhythm is real. Rhythm is walking, and hitting things. Walking is hunting. Repetitive movement is for gathering and storing, for survival. Rhythm is existence.

Singing is useless.


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