Much Ado About Music

We currently live in a global society. We're all connected somehow, so music from all cultures has mixed, influences and sounds have spread out and created entire new genres. I find this fascinating. Why does music appeal to us? While we are not the only sentient animals on earth (various apes and even some dolphins have displayed traits characteristic of sentience), we are the only animals on earth that demonstrate a fondness for music, dance, and other art forms. This might mean that, within our psyche is ingrained a rhythmical structuring. You'll notice--assuming you have an eye for such things, of course--that the more 'successful' works of visual art display patterns of some sort, whether they be obvious, such as the engrossing tessellations and geometric forms inherent to the artwork of M. C. Escher, or more subtle patterns, perhaps first noticed only on a semi-subconscious level, such as color patterns/arrangements. So, visual art is largely based on some sort of internal rhythm which we perceive as our eyes move over a piece of artwork.

Are humans creatures of rhythm? It seems that way to me. Music is, obviously, heavily rhythmical... if that needed clarification. Almost every song ever written has a steady beat, such as the whimsical flow of classical music, to the pounding blast beats or breakdowns of more contemporary modern bands associated with various genres of metal.

I'm getting the impression here that humans have a very accurate, deeply ingrained sense of rhythm. I don't even know how to explain it. When you think about it, everything we do has a pattern or something to it. When you're fucking, it's in and out, in and out, until... you know. When you eat, you chew at a steady rate. When you're running, jogging, walking, etc... do I even have to point that one out? As I type this very essay, I'm typing at a relatively steady pace. It's everywhere.

Music started a really long fucking time ago, before civilization. Humans were, at the time, essentially nothing more than little tribes spread out over the world... actually, not even the whole world until later, when people migrated into the Americas during the Ice Age... but I'm going off topic. Anyways, you have all these little roving tribes of people. They didn't have any contact to speak of, save for the occasional event that maybe two tribes would cross paths. Somehow, music started up everywhere on its own. It's not like one tribe discovered music and told everybody about it on Twitter. Everyone was separated then. So what prompted the birth of music and dance among all these non-connected groups of people? Think about it. When you think of crazy tribal people dancing around a fire and chanting and acting a damn fool, when are they doing this? At night. It's always at night, probably for various reasons--warding off evil spirits before going to sleep, whatever. Now, when these ancient tribes hunted in the morning, they needed tools/weapons to be ready. So they had to start making their flint knives, axes, clubs, bows and arrows, spears, etc., the evening before the hunt. As it got dark, they had to have a fire to provide light for their chore. Now, picture in your mind Tarzan or whoever, sitting there by the fire, smacking rocks together to make his flint axe (did Tarzan use an axe? I don't even know) so he could go chop up some lion the next day. He's doing this with a steady rhythm, most likely. It's a mundane chore. Smack, smack, smack, oooooh axe sharp, smack. And he's probably grunting with the force of his exertions. Making stone weapons ain't child's play, after all. Somewhere along the line, this process became dancing the night away, probably high off some burning herbs or something (Hindu Indians, Romans, and Assyrians and probably some other ones have been smoking weed for a long fucking time), singing their songs or whatever.

So, while I have failed to determine what the purpose is for this biological metronome, I have at least pointed out that it's there.

Anyways, hope you enjoyed reading this. It was really fun to write, at least. Thinking about shit like this is maybe helping me hold on to my sanity...