Dear colleague,

There is an evidence on the earliest use of flutes as musical instrument circa 35000 years ago and was published in Nature. Here’s the link. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v460/n7256/full/nature08169.html

The best,

Barry Blesser writes about the importance of acoustics (i.e. sound ambiance) for rituals performed in caves.

Blesser, B., & Salter, L.-R. (2006). Spaces speak, are you listening? : experiencing aural architecture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Hi

Maybe this will be useful:

J. Atema 2014; Musical origins and the stone age evolution of flutes, "Acoustics Today", vol. 10(3): 26-34.

https://acousticstoday.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Musical-Origins-and-the-Stone-Age-Evolution-of-Flutes.pdf

L. Aiano 2006; Pots and drums: an acoustic study of Neolithic pottery drums, "euroREA. Journal for (Re)construction and Experiment in Archaeology", vol. 3: 31-42.

http://journal.exarc.net/files/exarc-eurorea_3_2006-pots_and_drums_an_acoustic_study_of_neolithic_pottery_drums.pdf

A. Nikolsky 2015; Evolution of tonal organization in music mirrors symbolic representation of perceptual reality. Part-1: prehistoric, "Frontiers in Psychology", 6:1405

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/9d6b/413e99cc4d51fd2fa2510e84fb156d57efc0.pdf

Best Regards

Maciej Wawrzczak

Mohammad,

In the American Southwest the deity Kokopelli is often shown playing a flute. Petroglyphs dated over 1000 years old have been found of the flute player. There is some interesting stories and ethnographic theories on the origination of Kokopelli. Several of these suggests that a trader or traders used music to announced their approach to the villages or to calm/ease the tensions of the villagers once among them. Other researchers suggest that he might be a native association to the cicada because of its noise and Kokopelli's depiction sometimes has what appears to be antennae. You might find some useful subject matter in this.

JAG

Dear Colleague

Archaeological evidence reveals the use of sound by humans since the Palaeolithic. However the origins of music is a complex theme that cannot be approached in a short text. Prehistoric rock art has many examples of people dancing (to sound or music, obviously) and of people playing musical instruments such as flutes, drums, lyre, among other.

In 2006, C. Scarre and G. Lawson edited the Proceedings of the first Conference about Archaeoacoustics - The Archaeology of Sound. Some articles deal with music.

Since 2014, the OTS Foundation has been organizing conferences about Archaeoacoustics (Malta, 2014, Istanbul, 2015). The next Conference will be in Portugal in 2017: http://www.otsf.org/2017-conference.html 

Archaeoacoustics has been developing in a multidisciplinary way, involving archaeologists, anthropologists, musicians, neuroscientists, psychologists and acoustic enginneers. 

In my paper on Research Gate "Neolithic art, Archaeoacoustics and Neuroscience" I approach the use of sound for rituals inside prehistoric chambers in the UK and Malta.

I hope that these short tips may be useful. Please feel free to ask more about this thematic.

Best wishes,

Fernando Coimbra

Fernando,

Excellent suggestion. I remember reading not too long ago about a theory that some caves with rock art in them being perfect resonance chambers for music or chants.

 Thanks James. You probably refer to the article of I. Reznikoff and M. Dauvois - La dimension sonore des grottes ornées. Chris Scarre also has an article about it. This theory was recently confirmed by an interdisciplinary research team working in several caves from the North of Spain. See

https://songsofthecaves.wordpress.com/