Wind-chimes and Heart Beats

When?

By Vishnupriya Jampa

Everyone loves music, whether it is birds, humans, you, me and even Aliens – because it is believed that music was heard even on the rings of Saturn. Everybody loves music. Despite, everyone loving music, like different people, we all listen to different kinds of music, whether it is Rock, Hindustani, Western Classical, Pop, Reggae, Techno, each one has their own choice and that is what makes music so special. It is a universally diverse thing that brings together yet, divides the entire UNIVERSE. But how did this begin? Or was there any beginning at all?

Music could have started in hundreds of ways. If you think of music as communication, perhaps it started with all creatures, including humans. Even today, music is referred to as the Universal Language. Or if you think of music as sound, then of course it began before anything, maybe it began with time.

What is music? We all know that it involves rhythm and sounds and notes and pitch and so many other aspects. Rhythm if considered as most important, then do you not have music all around you? The repetitive whirr of the fan, the rhythmic beating of your heart, the click of a clock or in nature the buzz of the bee, the continual galloping of the horse, rhythm and music exists everywhere.

Then, how exactly did humans start making music, perhaps by trying to send messages by blowing inside hollow pieces of woods or banging things together and later perhaps progressed to use it as entertainment. Eventually, string instruments were created from bits of vine or animal gut. Drums were, perhaps, advanced using animal skins.

But just like how music is subjective, so is the theory of how it came about, to you it could have existed since millions of years before humans, to some it was the child that all humans bore together.