Care to hear the oldest song in the world, from ancient Sumeria?
It’s not bad. Could be improved with a little Justin Bieber.
If you’re at all interested in music, you should come to the Common Cup Coffeehouse here in Morris tonight at 6. Wes Flinn and I will be talking about music and the brain. We’re trying something a little different: I know nearly nothing about music, but I have a degree in neuroscience; Wes is a guy with a Ph.D. in music theory, but is not a biologist. I figure that between the two of us we can come up with something interesting about how the brain deals with music.
Or possibly I’ll talk about music and he’ll talk about neuro, and the audience can drink coffee and laugh.
I’d give it an 8, Dave. It has a nice beat and it’s easy to crush your enemies by.
This is fascinating. I am always torn by snippets of ancient life. On the one hand I am so fascinated to see what ordinary life was like so long ago. But, on the other hand, it reminds me that the true flavor, the character of that civilization is so completely lost to us. You often hear about how out of towners don’t “get” a particular city, like New York or London or LA. I feel like no-one will ever be able to understand the true character of these ancient cities and peoples. And that makes me sad.
Needs more cowbell.
Boom!!!!!
The interpretation played on a lyre is beautiful (click the link!).
erichoug,
I didn’t think anyone else would feel the way I feel when I read or think about old history. Well said.
Didn’t I hear this in an old Final Fantasy NES game?
Wow, that MIDI rendition sounds terrible. There’s not enough Justin Bieber in the world to fix that … wait, how would anything improve??
Heh. I think that one is what I heard back in the day (not 1400 BCE!), in a music history course I guess. It’s quite pleasant. Most likely the tuning is off a little from the original (how accurately were they measuring things?), but probably not enough to be especially noticeable. Interpreting it rhythmically is a much bigger challenge I’m sure. So of course we can only imagine how it “really” sounded to those people or what it meant to them.
This is the oldest known form of notation, by the way. This is why literacy is good, and why you should write things down while you have the chance.
What’s a “song”? What’s the “oldest music”? Those are somewhat harder questions. We’ve found instruments much, much older than this. And people were certainly making music of some sort, well before they got into making complicated and time-consuming objects like that.
CR:
Yes, and that’s sad, because even if someone got it right, how would we ever know?
I don’t think those are answerable, because I expect music (or song) is as old as we are, collectively. I hear music in the flow of water, in the tumble of rocks, in different types of wind. Pretty sure people always have done, and it seems to me that humming is damn near instinctive.
I believe the lyrics began “Here I sit, broken-hearted…”
Hmmmm. I’m an outlier, who can’t stand pop music, (nothing after Louis Armstrong, anyway). I find it unpleasant, & don’t understand how anyone can like the crap. I’ve always been like this. (I’m in my 70’s now.)
If you (PZ & WF) can figure out why a minority of people are like me, I’d love to know why. (I suspect that it’s got something to do with not responding well to social cues.)
How do they get “Sumerian” when the tablets were found in Ugarit (not a Sumerian city), and written in Hurrian?
Nightmare time. Reminds me of Music History in school. First semester: earliest through Baroque. Second semester Classical through modern. Text Donald J. Grout “A History of Western Music.” (Sorry can’t underline title.) Impossible to avoid these classes and still suffering >40 years later.
Thanks for tonight’s upcoming nightmare–having to study the most ancient stuff. BWAAAAAAAAHHHH!
s/
Archangelo Spumoni (born in 1605, flourished around 1700). Married twice to women named “Vera” making it clear that “La Prima Vera” was a reference to the first wife. Semi-sincere apologies to PDQ Bach and Peter Schickele here.
I would so love to come to this!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Wrong continent, wrong continent dammit dammit dammit.
The midi version was horrifically awful. The lyre version was absolutely beautiful.
I know how to make it sound better:
Turn it up to ELEVEN!
Don F:
:Snort: Fuck, tea all over.
For anyone who claims that music became more complex over time, I counter with Beethoven’s “Ode To Joy” and Link Wray’s “Rumble”.
Pfff. I used to like those guys before they sold out.
The mildly deranged penguin says she knows the fifth guy, who left become they became fossilized. She says she’s heard he’s now working in a delicatessen selling clay candy.
left0ver1under:
It was Schiller’s Ode to Joy, the poem which is the source of most of the text sung by the soloists and chorus in the thing Beethoven actually made. Anyway, if you’re really telling me his ninth symphony (or only its last movement) isn’t more complex than this, then I guess we don’t agree on what complexity is. Probably, you’re conflating a highly-reduced arrangement for unaccompanied solo voice (i.e., just a monophonic melody) with the thing that Beethoven actually wrote. But even that relies on a more complicated tonal/harmonic framework and formal structure than this piece does. This has two voices rather than only one, so I will grant you that (if we’re not talking about the piece for orchestra and chorus), for what it’s worth, but again those voices don’t “move” in the complicated way that the “Ode to Joy” melody does.
I agree that “Rumble” is pretty simple, relative to a lot of other music. Nevertheless, there’s a whole lot of complexity in it that simply isn’t displayed in any kind of ancient music, because music theories have had an enormous impact on what kind of music gets made in different times and places. That piece has definite rhythms and meter (not any old arbitrary or ambiguous sequence of events in time), extremely specific timbres for a varied set of instruments, fairly elaborate phrase structure and harmonic content, to say nothing of what had to go into making an actual audio recording which I could find instantly on youtube — none of which you see in the simple sequence of tones written out for the Hurrian hymn. (But their musicians might have cared somewhat about some of those features when interpreting it. Who knows? We can’t even figure out lots of 17th-18th century performance practice these days, but that’s totally out of the question for the 14th century BCE.) Perhaps Link Wray had no idea of the immense historical/cultural/intellectual backdrop which allowed them to do stuff like that, perhaps they did have some clue, but they don’t need to be aware of that in order to take advantage of it. Those influences are just already there, “in the water” so to speak, whether or not you ever study anything about them.
*jingle* The hits from the Tigris to the Euphrates! *jingle*
Sumerian Top 40 is heard every week up and down the Fertile Crescent on great radio stations like…
How do they get “Sumerian” when the tablets were found in Ugarit (not a Sumerian city), and written in Hurrian?
I found that odd as well. My guess is that “Sumerian” is being used as a sort of informal syecdoche for “cuneiform,” Sumerian being the first language written in that system. Maybe?
Quite right, Sumerian is not related to Hurrian, and neither are related to Ugaritic Akkadian. However, all three were written contemporaneously, even long after ethnic Sumerians had been assimilated into other peoples. This was especially true in places like Ugarit, which was a cosmopolitan city where we find a dozen languages being copied down contemporaneously using the Sumero-Akkadian writing system we call cuneiform. It happens that all the musical compositions recovered from Ugarit are written in Hurrian, presumably because they were used for a specific Hurrian cult set up there.
The country of indigenous Sumerians is Sumer, not *Sumeria.
The musical tablets are interesting finds, but the fact is this is not what they sounded like. We don’t know what instrument they were for, or how to correspond their notes to our conventions. We only know the size and shape of the scale and what the relation of one note was to another note, but not where it starts – hence the different “interpretations” in the linked article.
Incidentally the first video in the article, the one PZ linked, is almost certainly the poorest representation. Only single notes were recorded, not chords as we once thought, and this has been acknowledged by Professor Kilmer in light of Professor Dumbrill’s and other’s improvements – though these are by no means without their own flaws. Short of extra information from other sites coming in, there is not enough information there to represent any of the Hurrian musical pieces adequately and they are just guesses and exercises.
I took Akkadian and Ugaritic in college, and it is always bittersweet to the near eastern language community when the mainstream picks up on something we find exciting, and proceeds to twist its accuracy in order to draw unjust comparisons to the modern age, to show how similar we all are or some such nonsense. A good example of this is when media report on the Babylonian’s mathematical abilities, and talk about “the math problems” and “textbooks” we found. We didn’t. A so-called math problem from the region has no notation and makes no leaps into abstract thought whatsoever, being of the form “fifty steps north” and “ten steps sunward” to give ultra specific answers for use in mapping out unconventional quadrilaterals for temples and other buildings. There is no abstract here in the Greek sense until the Seleucids inherit the region from Alexander.
The people of the Early Bronze Age had totally alien cultures to ones that exist today (not “alien” in the history channel sense, of course). Sure they had men and women and bars and lawsuits and sarcasm, but we would recognize little else.
I guess I should listen to the lyre version. The midi does sound like a video game.
I’ve actually been thinking about human communication, and the origins of language due to the discussion about Luce Irigaray in the feminism isn’t a side issue thread. (synopsis~ psycho-linguistics is fascinating, and french philosophers are difficult reading)
My very own theory (which is mine) is that music is intrinsic to developing language. Music came first as these primates demonstrate. Indah and Benny duet
Obligatory Bobby Mcfarrin video demonstrating people’s intrinsic knowledge of the pentatonic scale.
Tethys @24: Possibly related: There was a segment of Spencer Wells’ documentary “Journey of Man” dealing with a religious ceremony somewhere in India, which involved a song/chant that had been passed from generation to generation for dog knows how long. It was in no known language, and seemed to be pre-language (my memory’s a bit fuzzy on that). You or anyone else know about this? Can’t find anything specific online.
taraskan:
That last part is not quite right. Your reference to “where it starts” presumably means what the transposition is (although “transposition” is misleading in the absence of equal temperament … so, what the specific frequencies were supposed to be, if any), and of course we don’t know anything like that. Indeed, various instruments of different sizes might have played it, along with vocalists singing it in other settings, around different tonal centers in each case, because they may not have cared about that at all (just as modern vocalists are often happy to sing a tune at whatever range they find comfortable, which poses a real problem for their accompanists).
However, “the size and shape of the scale” is the critical and most useful bit, and I was under the impression that there’s enough information (in terms of string lengths, I’m assuming, or equivalently something like finger positions) to determine several likely possibilities about that (see below). People would recognize a piece that was “transposed” to another “key” (another misleading term there), but rendering it into a different set of intervals (another scale or set of scales, or using a radically different tuning) would not leave it as recognizably the same thing. I could give you all twelve transpositions of one of these interpretations (if you believe there are only twelve notes) right now, and it wouldn’t be any sort of a problem. But there’s little or no music theoretical interest in finding out which one of those would be the closest match anyway. On the other hand, whether there even is a single closest match would be more interesting to know, just not which particular one it would be.
Instead, the point is, the “different interpretations” you cited aren’t just a matter of deciding something simple like that, which wouldn’t make much of a difference anyway. There’s uncertainty about which “scales” are being represented by the notation. In other words, which mode/permutation of the diatonic scale they belong in, if any … assuming the notes fit reasonably well into a chromatic scale which contains the diatonic scales, although none of that may be the case. That puts us in a much worse situation. But you can make somewhat educated guesses about it, what people were likely to do and what things probably mean (as I’m sure you know, having studied ancient languages). The evidence just isn’t clear enough to rule out a few alternative interpretations, certainly not like it is for the vast majority of music from the last several hundred years. Of course, I can’t read a word of it, so this is only what I’ve been able to gather second-hand.
Rob Grigjanis
No, I was unaware of Journey of Man. I am currently watching it on youtube while I work. Thank you so much! I am always looking for interesting media online, as I got rid of my TV years ago. I will take note of the timestamp, and report back.
Gah. Those weren’t all human beings in the audience, first of all, and I don’t get what “intrinsic knowledge” is supposed to mean or how that might be demonstrated. For one thing, he even primed them with the notes they should sing, so (intrinsic or not, whatever that’s about) it wasn’t knowledge that they already needed to have. People can associate visual cues (his hopping from one spot to another), or various other kinds of cues, with what they’re supposed to do in a musical performance. At least adults, or those near adulthood (like the audience) can do that — which doesn’t mean that it wasn’t learned through the course of their lives, just that they can. That’s what you saw there, and sure, that’s kind of neat.
It also could have been lots of things other than a pentatonic scale (or close to one, since the whole crowd wasn’t singing in tune anyway), and similar things would have happened. Bobby sings those a whole hell of lot, so that’s what he picked. Why not a chromatic scale? Because it’s a little harder for non-musicians to consistently discriminate semitones and produce them reliably? How would it follow that we “know” something extra about the pentatonic, if it’s just easier to do? It’s like saying human beings have intrinsic knowledge of cheese sandwiches, because most of us can easily make those, while we’re not all so skilled at more difficult recipes like a Thanksgiving turkey. Is making cheese sandwiches built into our DNA, or an abstraction that descended into our minds from Plato’s heaven … or what? I mean, I don’t even know what that kind of claim is supposed to be about, much less whether it’s true. When and how did we supposedly get this knowledge? Do infants have it? Is it a different sort of knowledge than what we may have of any other musical concept?
CR
Do you have any experience with infants? I do, and have yet to run across one that doesn’t respond to, and mimic music, long before they develop verbal abilities. Toddlers really love the drums and basslines in heavy metal, IME they automatically dance and head bang in perfect time. Our brains are absolutely hardwired for human communication. Isn’t that how we got such big brains in the first place?
Journey of Man begins with the San people of the Kalahari. I just watched and completely understood them vocalize sounds of dismay at the misses, and then sounds of approval + applause to communicate appreciation for Spencer Well’s first successful attempt to hit a target using a bow and arrow. +3 data points to the theory that pitch and rhythmic sound is intrinsic to human communication.
@#27 Thank you, “transposition” is what I wanted for “start”. If your point is exactness is unnecessary because this is still music and interpretation comes with the territory, then I concede it. I just wanted to communicate that all the scholars involved in these recreations are fully cognizant they are interpreting what are basically doodles with their own doodling, and that we’ve probably bungled much more up than we can ever know. From everything I’ve seen, there is more unknown here than just the transposition. For one, we’re assuming the note transcription system – the irregularly spaced numerals written below lyrics – has the same values in the Hurrian texts as in the Akkadian tablets found in an entirely different city and century which help describe the “TAB” system. For another, the Hurrian tablets themselves contain lacunae, as do most tablets, and so there will be gaps. That’s the kind of thing I mean. We also assume the notes were written for instrumentation, but it is never specified, the guess being a 9-stringed lyre, but there is no evidence at all that it wasn’t simply sung without accompaniment. The lyre is a complete out of the blue guess by Dumbrill. Sometimes we can catch these mistakes, such as why the first linked video is incorrect – it seems the tuning system was intended to be descending instead of ascending, and the second numbers refer to rhythm rather than another series of notes and there are therefore no chords represented as originally though. You might be interested in this informal explanation by Dumbrill about his contribution to the project, and what is still unknown about it. A great part of the issue, as explained by Kilmer in earlier interviews, is that few musical scholars have a knowledge of how to reconstruct Hurrianized Akkadian tuning systems and vice versa, so a lot of collaberation was required. Ones who don’t know what “transposition” refers to, for example!
@29
I really didn’t mean it that seriously. Though the pentatonic scale is pretty much the most broadly attested scale across cultures, everything from Asian melodies to “Amazing Grace.” The 12-note chromatic scale is well-known now but it’s a product of the European late Middle Ages. Indian and Persian music can have many more notes per octave and the Chinese didn’t have a chromatic scale as such.
In sound design we use major-third intervals a lot to indicate motion or an unresolved progression– there’s a lot of folktales about why, in school our sound professor (an engineer, not any kind of biologist) insisted that babies make major thirds when they cry and adults are adapted to find this interval alarming when repeated. (Your mileage may vary.)
Augmented fourths also come up a lot to indicate something modern or artificial- Bernstein’s “Cool” from West Side Story has a Tritone on the word “Cool,” because Bernstein claimed this was the interval subway brakes made when the train stopped at a station.
As to the essence of our abilities, it’s open to interpretation and further research is warranted, though our physical auditory system is definitely optimized for certain bands and intervals, for example your ear has a resonance around 2-3kHz, and formants of speech just happen to sit in this band. There are also several known reflexes related to how you localize sounds and respond to certain kinds of transient sounds, that seem to be universal, and also quite complex.
@Tethys
Coming from a background in linguistics, I can tell you that yes, there are metrical qualities built into human language. Footing, tone, pitch, volume, all play a role in saliency – sometimes across phrases, sometimes in individual words. But you should be careful about music-language interaction papers, as the road is frought with crackpots and new ageists. Actually much to do with language is. I haven’t seen/read “Journey of Man”, but I am skeptical to the point of laughing about any ritualistic song in India being “pre-language” if that was indeed the claim. I see the subtitle is “a genetic odyssey”, which raises more alarms – not because genetics is not super useful in understanding human migration (it very much is), but because some crackpots insist on mapping haplogroups onto linguistic families, and then insist certain families are related to fit their genetic data, when there is every evidence they are not. If you come across in your reading anything with the name Sforza or Merritt Ruhlen, or anyone who makes claims about language before 8,000 B.P., run as fast as you can into the hills. So to the extent this documentary video makes linguistic claims, be on guard.
If you want to learn about linguistic prosody, let me start you off the same way my professors did: with English fucking-infixation rules, and Alan Yu’s paper on “Homeric” infixation (or, how you know where the -ma- in Saxo-ma-phone goes).
I much prefer the lyre on this one.
But it’d be really awesome if someone, like, metalled it up.
Tethys:
Yes, I’ve known toddlers who loved Mozart and Stravinsky too, or just about any sort of music while we’re at it.
But that has nothing to do with having knowledge of pentatonic scales, like for example (C, D, E, G, A) or (A, C, D, E, G). Maybe you’re not familiar with it, but there is a vast domain of crackpottery out there pertaining to things like this, the circle of fifths, the overtone series, the Deep Esoteric Secrets of Pythagoras, and so forth. They’re much like people, often the very same people, who think the numbers pi and phi have mystical or spiritual significance.
Of course, questions about what’s a universal psychological trait in humans aren’t bullshit, but that stuff gets mixed in with it all too often, by people who have no idea what they’re talking about. I can think of much more mundane reasons why people would use those kinds of scales (or something close to them) in numerous cultures all over the world, that’s all.
It’s not obvious that banging your head in time is an instance of human communication, especially since you can find parrots doing it, which seem to be neither human nor communicating. It’s also not obvious that communication is the right word to describe more generally what we do with our music perception, since it’s not a language with that kind of content. What does a quarter note G-flat mean or what does it refer to, in the sense that you know what I’m communicating to you with the word “cat”? I have no idea. And we don’t actually know how we got such big brains in the first place. Do we?
Anyway, I was trying to address the specific claim that pentatonic scales have some special property or significance, or that all people have some peculiar kind of knowledge about them.
Regarding Journey of Man, the narrator makes some dubious claims at the beginning about the language of the San people, suggesting that there ancestors created language 50k years ago and that clicks were present from the beginning of language and that they were lost by the population that broke off from the San and peopled the rest of the planet. As a hypothesis I guess it’s possible, but there are a lot of dubious assumptions behind it that can’t be tested with current methods, and probably ever (just one example–if he’s right, it suggests that Neanderthals didn’t have language; not bloody likely). As Taraskan says, don’t trust anyone making claims about language from more than about 8k years ago.
Fortunately he abandons linguistics after that and sticks to his genetic story, which is basically about what markers on the y-chromosome tell us about human migrations. That’s well beyond my area of expertise so I can’t really comment.
Right, well, I just meant that you sort of phrased it the wrong way around. We don’t know the transposition, true enough, but the bigger issue is that we also aren’t sure about the kind of scale or tuning that was used.
Sure. Who knows? However, it does seem pretty likely that a string instrument would’ve helped them come up with a numerical representation of the pitches (as you get with modern Western notation). You play around with the strings, you see the lengths of the strings when different notes are heard, you associate the two and measure the lengths. Pretty simple. A person’s voice doesn’t give you any obvious clues like that, about how different notes are produced physically. That’s the sort of thing you need to understand, if you’re going to write something down that will help other people reproduce the particular sequence of notes that you wanted. If you’re not sort of on the right track physically, you’re not going to be representing the sounds in a fairly consistent way, so your performers won’t have something consistent to do.
So, yes, that particular piece may be arranged for vocals (maybe they wouldn’t be very picky about arrangements though), which were almost certainly present to the lyrics that go with it. But when it comes developing any notation system at all, this being the first instance of that in history which we know about, a string instrument would’ve been helpful, no? So it seems like a stretch that they would’ve immediately tossed it aside, so they can just have vocals. That’s not tangible physical evidence of course, but it’s clear how they would’ve done it otherwise.
That is interesting. Perhaps something like the early Greeks, who were apparently referring to how “narrow” or “wide” the distances are between the locations where a string is pressed, instead of how “high” or “low” the pitches were? (The high/low metaphor we use now was developed later.) That reverses the meaning of ascending and descending, if the strings in question are something like a cello, because you shorten the string (making the pitch “higher“) by moving your fingers down toward the ground.
myself:
Thanks for the commentary on Journey of Man everybody. It has gone through India, and Kazakhstan without any ancient songs. Currently on the Chukchik, and a discussion of Bergmann’s and Allen’s rules.
Tethys @40: My memory’s fuzzier than I thought. The Indian song was in Michael Wood’s “Story of India”. And some commentary I just found agrees with taraskan @34, saying it’s much more likely to be a leftover from a substrate language, or just nonsense syllables made up at some point. According to one commenter, Wood references Frits Staal’s Rules Without Meaning.
Despite the bit of nonsense, Wood’s show is gripping stuff as well.
#9 UnknownEric
“I woke up this morning…”
Journey of Man does not have any ancient songs. It concluded in North America with Navajo people. It was amusing to see the fancy scientist being told that it is rude to refer to a peoples creation stories as myth, especially since the Navajo are well aware that their ancestors migrated over huge distances to reach their current geographic location.
CR
Many animals besides humans communicate via song. I don’t think head banging is intrinsic to humans. It’s just a phenomenon that I have noted in multiple children. I think a child who has never seen a music video reacting to the music by head banging, dancing, and spontaneous drumming is both adorable and might be an example of hard-wired human behavior. While music may not qualify as language on linguistic grounds, humans do in fact use music to communicate. Music conveys emotion without having to use any language at all.
Ah, I see. Thanks for the BS alert, I know nothing of music theory, so pentatonic scales simply means five notes to me. I found it especially interesting that the audience changed octaves with zero verbal instruction when he moved off the original 5 notes.
oops, I failed to refresh before posting and didn’t see Rob Grigjanis
I will watch that next. I enjoyed Journey of Man, though I think there were a few speculative opinions expressed as facts. I wish he had collected samples from the women too, though I understand that he only deals with Y genes. It would be interesting to see if the women’s mtDNA would tell the same story as the men’s Y, or if it would tell very different stories.