Music can bring us to tears or to our feet, drive us into battle or lull us to sleep.
Music is indeed remarkable in its power over all humankind, and perhaps for that very
reason, no human culture on earth has ever lived without it. From discoveries made in
France and Slovenia even Neanderthal man, as long as 53,000 years ago, had developed
(5)surprisingly sophisticated, sweet-sounding flutes carved from animal bones. It is perhaps
then, no accident that music should strike such a chord with the limbic system – an
ancient part of our brain, evolutionarily speaking, and one that we share with much of the
animal kingdom. Some researchers even propose that music came into this world long
before the human race ever did. For example, the fact that whale and human music have
(10)so much in common even though our evolutionary paths have not intersected for nearly 60
million years suggests that music may predate humans. They assert that rather than being
the inventors of music, we are latecomers to the musical scene.
Humpback whale composers employ many of the same tricks that human
songwriters do. In addition to using similar rhythms, humpbacks keep musical phrases to a
(15)few seconds, creating themes out of several phrases before singing the next one. Whale
songs in general are no longer than symphony movements, perhaps because they have a
similar attention span. Even though they can sing over a range of seven octaves, the
whales typically sing in key, spreading adjacent notes no farther apart than a scale. They
mix percussive and pure tones in pretty much the same ratios as human composers – and
(20)follow their ABA form, in which a theme is presented, elaborated on and then revisited in a
slightly modified form. Perhaps most amazing, humpback whale songs include repeating
refrains that rhyme. It has been suggested that whales might use rhymes for exactly the
same reasons that we do: as devices to help them remember. Whale songs can also be
rather catchy. When a few humpbacks from the Indian Ocean strayed into the Pacific,
(25)some of the whales they met there quickly changed their tunes – singing the new whales’
songs within three short years. Some scientists are even tempted to speculate that a
universal music awaits discovery.