Remembering the iPod era. Charlie Bertsch, in Souciant.
As I read this, it occurred to me that for most of musical history, music wasn't something that you owned. Unless you could play the piece, you couldn't take it with you, and to the extent you could, it was only a fragmented interpretation. In middle and high school, I spent a significant amount of time making mix tapes, which I listened to while moving about. There was an art to these mix tapes, they captured a time and a place, and we shared our best among friends. When I listen to music now, I often don't know when it was created. I don't have much urge to. I look at my collection of CDs and know that their date with the trash heap is coming. My iTunes collection is a garbled mess of untitled tracks and local and cloud-based storage. I still have the urge to build a musical library, but I don't want it tethered, and that seems to be impossible. I have given up trying.From one perspective, the cloud-centered culture that predominates now takes this principle even further. Yet it comes to us in a form at odds with ownership. The music we stream — and, in some cases, provisionally download — from Spotify, Beats Music and similar ventures, as well as what we access on YouTube, never belongs to us the way that the music we manually load onto our computers did. No matter how many playlists we construct, no matter how many of our friends to subscribe to them, we are still working with borrowed materials. They belong to a library, but not our library.
I think this is a large factor in the recent vinyl surge. People miss the physical aspect of owning something. I wouldn't throw those CD's away just yet, people are beginning to collect CD's with the same sort of passion they do vinyl. Interesting observation regarding the history of "owning" music, I have not given that enough thought. Much like storytelling, music would have been passed down through generations. I would be fascinated to hear the earliest composed songs by humans. What were they like? theadvancedapes, is there any hypothesis in to how these were structured or where they first occurred?
The two main hypotheses for the origin of music center around sexual selection and group selection. However, in recent years, evidence for the communal/group/cliquey-nature of human music expression, the group selection hypothesis is now favoured. This may have interesting implications for the origin of music during the transition from arboreal to terrestrial existence. From Joseph Jordania's Who Asked The First Question?:The best evolutionary chance for our human ancestors to survive at the dangerous "ground level" was the strengthening of social bonds within social groups, increasing group size and a new impressive "lion dance". Choral singing at this stage (before the advance of articulated speech) must have been a means of social bonding and stress relief as well, but I suggest that the primary evolutionary function of choral singing was a strategic defence against major African predators.
Joseph Jordania is an ethnomusicologist, not a physical anthropologist. Anyway, my question to him is 'whatever the hell sort of evidence have you got to advance this hypothesis'? Because, lions being primarily visual predators that hunt in groups and stalk their prey, Mr. or Ms. Lion ain't gonna take none of that 'sound like a larger animal' shit if you can't look the part.
1. Disciplinary boundaries alone are no reason to discount a hypothesis. 2. You should read his thesis where he describes his hypothesis in complete detail - surprisingly I wasn't able to quote the entire paper for you here in this Hubski comment section. 3. I prefaced the proposed hypothesis with the language of "now favoured" and "may". This may indicate to you that it is not at all an issue that has been resolved - and there is still healthy academic debate. Hopefully you will forgive me for not citing every opinion and research article on the history of evolutionary music theory.
I'm insinuating more that given the nature of how big cats hunt with greater dependence on vision than auditory and olfactory cues (although they use all three in their hunting), I am VERY skeptical that the auditory stimulation by choral singing would have been an effective method of deception unless it was accompanied by, as in the modern Chinese lion dance, a disguise, which is not mentioned in the quote. Making yourself look bigger is actually an effective defense against large visual predators, like bears and big cats. To paint the whole picture you have to consider their predators too.