Instant Genius - The evolution of music, its impact on human culture and its future

Episode Date: June 1, 2025

There’s little doubt that music is an integral part of what it means to be human. But how did it first arise, how did musical instruments and compositions become ever more sophisticated and why does listening to or playing music bring us so much joy? In this episode, we speak to science writer and music producer David Darling about his latest book A Perfect Harmony: Music, Mathematics and Science. He tells us how the oldest pitched musical instrument found so far is thought to be more than 40,000 years old, the role music has played in the evolution of human culture, and what the impact AI-generated music may have on the work of human musicians and composers in the near future. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Get this new must-have concealer at Sephora or at Sephora.com today. This podcast is sponsored by name, audio and focal. Streaming has made music more accessible than ever, but true listening is about more than ease. It's about quality. British audio experts name audio, alongside French acoustic specialist focal, combine handcrafted tradition with cutting-edge innovation

and high-end materials, delivering digital precision with analogue warmth. So you can experience exceptional sound at home. Music just as the artist intended. Visit name audio. com to learn more. Hello and welcome to Instant Genius, a bite-sized masterclass in podcast form. Every Monday and Friday, you'll hear world-leading scientists and experts

talking about the most fascinating ideas in science and technology today. I'm Jason Goodyear, commissioning editor at BBC Science Focus. There's little doubt that music is an integral part of what it means to be human. But how did it first arise? How did musical instruments and compositions become ever more sophisticated? and why does listening to or playing music bring us so much joy? In this episode, we speak to science writer and music producer David Darling about his latest book, A Perfect Harmony, Music, Mathematics and Science.

He tells us how the oldest pitched musical instrument found so far is thought to be more than 40,000 years old, the role music's played in the evolution of human culture and what the impact of AI-generated music may have on the work of human musicians and composers in the near future. So welcome to the podcast. Thanks very much for joining us.

That's great to be here. Thanks for having me. So today we're talking about your book, A Perfect Harmony, Music, Mathematics and Science. So in the book, you investigate the question, the interesting question of what exactly is music? So first off, can you talk us through your thoughts on that, please? Well, everybody will give you a different answer to this, of course, because it is a subjective type of thing. We can talk about music being a series of tones or pitches. We can talk about rhythm.

We can talk about melody. All these are elements of music and harmony as well when notes are combined together. These are all the sort of standard components of music. But above and beyond that, because a lot of sounds you could fit into that kind of category, for example, waves crashing on the shore. bird song, for example, is that actually musical? Now, I don't think birds, when they sing, as we say, are attempting an artistic performance. They are communicating, certainly, but they're not using music in the way that we do. So I would say that a very important component of music is inducing an

emotional response in the receiver. I mean, for example, if you want to talk about music, being a series of pictures, having a definite rhythm, then a police siren would fall into that category, but no one on earth would say that's musical. It's just annoying sometimes, and it tells you, it communicates, but it's not musical. So I think something happens in the brain when we hear music that elicits a response, a feeling. It's usually pleasant, but it doesn't have to be. It could induce anger or it could rouse us to war, for example, in a march. You know, it can produce different feelings. But the key element that differentiates other sounds from music, I think, happens in the brain.

And it's the emotional response that it produces. So let's go way back in time then. In the book, you talk about the oldest musical instrument that's ever been discovered, this sort of bone flute. So what do we know about that? Well, we think this is going about 40,000 years or more. And this so-called Neanderthal flute, which was found in a cave in Slovenia, it can actually be played.

Well, we've made reproductions of it. And you can actually, it's got a couple of holes, clear holes, and then it's got two broken holes at the end. So it obviously had originally at least four holes in a hole on the other side. And they've clearly been manufactured somehow. They've been bored out of this. I think it's a bear cubs bone, and they've just hollered it out,

and they've put these holes in. And if you make a reproduction of this so-called Neanderthal flute, you can actually play tunes on it. You can make notes that today sound perfectly respectable, and you can play simple tunes that are well-known today. So it's clearly a musical instrument, and it was found by a hearth that was used by Neanderthals. So not even our own species,

pre-human if you like. But it is controversial. Some people have said, oh, you know, maybe it's just, it was made by, you know, carnivores biting into the bone and just those holes are made. It's very unlikely. It does seem like it was manufactured. But unquestionably, when we get into the period 30 to 40,000 years ago, there are all kinds of bone flutes that have been found. Some are made from bird bones, others from, you know, different types of mammals. And they would certainly made as flutes and can be played today, in fact. So musical instruments of that type, blown flutes go back tens of thousands of years. And presumably before that, we had percussion instruments because you hear sounds, two things beating together. That's going to suggest,

well, maybe we could make a rhythm by making a simple drum. Or if you make a hunting bow, for example, when the string twangs, that suggests, okay, how about if we make a make that a different length or we add a second string. And no doubt these people were investigating different sounds and they thought, well, that sounds good. Let's try this now. Let's try that. And so that's how the first musical instruments would have come about. So let's move a bit forward then. And you talk a lot about the early Mesopotamians, the kind of, I guess we can say musical culture that they had. So yeah, can you explain that to us, please. Well, certainly, I mean, we normally think of the Greeks in terms of originating Western

music, but the Greeks got their stuff from pre-culture, you know, Mesopotanians, Samarians, the things that they had learned passed down to the Greeks. So, for example, our musical scales, you know, the major and minor scales that used today actually came from the Mesopotamians, not from the Greeks. They just took those over. And the Mesopotamians were very, very musical. We can see that from the instruments we found. They were very very. very big on liars, by the way. The musical instrument was their most popular instrument. We found remains of these instruments and also instructions inscribed in clay tablets how to play these things and how to tune them as well. So the Mesopotamians were one of the originators

of modern music as we know it. They used it for pleasure. They used it for especially religious purposes as well. And that's been a big thing throughout history, really, the use of musical instruments to connect with gods. And that's really the first intimation of connecting music with a larger, the cosmos, if you like. And that has proceeded throughout the ages. So a lot of what we would now call modern music originated with the Mesopotamians and then was passed on to other cultures. Yeah, so in a way, not all that much has changed. No, and people make the mistake, I think, is when you go back in time,

they think the music must have been simpler and simpler and simpler, so that when you get back to the earliest cultures, it must have been very simple indeed and just based on a few notes, very primitive instruments. But right from the dawn of civilisation, there was music that we would recognise today as being like folk music. Obviously, it's taken different directions,

and this early music was probably just played on simple instruments. Of course, they didn't have the orchestras that we have today, so they didn't have the tuning systems that we had today, and they didn't have the elaboration of compositions that we have today, but the basics of music were already established 5,000, 6,000 years ago. So, yeah, one interesting thing, you mentioned their orchestras. I think it's quite funny because there's like a standard set of orchestral instruments that eventually we've picked out.

But there's all sorts of sort of curious instruments along the way that didn't make it, which I find really interesting. Yes. Well, I think there's been a sort of evolution of instruments and the type of music we want to play on them. So as you move from the Renaissance and the Baroque, and then into a romantic era, the orchestras have grown larger,

but that's because composers have demanded more of musicians and the instruments. And so the two have kind of grown hand in hand. Early on, you just had monophonic music. For example, in the medieval era, the most sophisticated form of music then would have been chants in churches and cathedrals. And the music was very simple. It was just based on a root note and a fifth and a fourth

and very slow, melodic, single melody line because that works in those kind of echoy places. You try and play a moment. modern pop song in a cathedral and the sound just bounces all over the place. It just simply doesn't work. But that kind of chanting is perfect. And also, back in those days, they believe that keeping the music simple and pure is what would please God most. So there was that spiritual connection as well. But then some composers started to think, well, let's go beyond this. Let's go beyond the simple consonants as the fourth and fifth. Let's add the third in. Let's add the sixth. Let's add a second,

a third voice, let's add more instruments. And then so as composers sort of pushing the boundaries of music, so the instruments had to evolve to, you know, to make that possible. And so instruments became louder. They became more flexible. In the Renaissance, you might have had the harpsich chord, which is a beautiful instrument, but it's very quiet. It's not going to work as a solo instrument in orchestra. So then some clever person came along with the piano, which is a much more dynamic range. You know, piano forte, soft, loud, it can play all kinds of things. And it can be heard above an orchestra. And all of the instruments evolved to these new demands of the composers. And once you have an orchestra, of course, it gives a new palette to composers. So now they're,

they can take advantage of that. So the things evolved together through time. So you mentioned their scales, and at the start you mentioned the emotional impact of music. So a lot of people, if they think about musical scales, they'll think of the difference between major and natural minor. And they'll say they evoke different moods. Yes. So what do we know about that? Well, in a way, that's one of the mysteries of music. I mean, if you talk about the major scale and the natural minor scale, they can be the same thing, really.

You're just starting on a beginning note. It's the third of the scale that's different. In the major scale, you've got the major third in the mind, natural minor. So if you play the scale of C major on a piano, for example, you start on, say, middle C, you can play C major just by going up in the white notes. Okay. But then if you start on the A of C major and play those series of seven notes beyond that, you'll get the scale of A minor.

It's exactly the same notes, but just in a different order. and it's focused on the A rather than the C. Why do we respond differently? And we do, because we say a major scale is a happy scale, and minor scale is kind of gives you that more subdued, sad feeling. It's how the brain responds, basically, to the positioning of the notes and the position of the minor scale, of the minor note, I should say, the third, the minor third.

So that's a little bit of a mystery. I don't think people can really explain why does that. We know it does, but there are mysteries to do with the, the brain interprets music that we still haven't completely figured out. And I suppose it's subjective too. You can listen to a minor piece of music and still be uplifted by it. He can be very, very pleasant. It doesn't throw you into depths of depression necessarily. So it is quite subtle. But there are things about how the brain interprets music, which we're still working on. Yeah.

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So the book's title is a perfect harmony. So let's have a look. What do we actually mean by the term harmony? Well, harmony is when you play, as I was saying earlier, the first types of music were monophonic. They were just a series of, and in many parts of the world today, Indian music, for example, is largely monophonic.

It's just a single series of notes played in time. Okay, it can be very, very sophisticated. It doesn't mean that it's less sophisticated than our Western type of music. It's different and it's largely monophonic. But beyond the Renaissance, people started playing notes together. So you end up with eventually chords. So, you know, maybe three notes played together, which sound nice together. And so harmony is basically running monophonic chains of notes together so that they sound pleasant when sounded together.

So harmony is the stacking, if you like, of notes vertically rather than in time. And this is a uniquely Western thing, actually. If you look at other cultures, they tend to be more monophonic and we've gone playing a base of melody rather than harmony. Western music is very largely based on harmony. Yeah, so when people are analysing music, they talk about consonants and dissonance. So why are some notes sort of, why are they friends? Why do they sound better together than others? Well, again, this goes back if you like to Pythagoras and Pythagoreans.

They love numbers and they've loved whole numbers especially. So if you play a root note and then obviously you can play an octave, which is actually, today we talk about frequency, so the octave would be double the frequency. If you play a string, for example, two thirds the way along its length, you'll get a perfect fifth. Now, to the Pythagorean's, that was very exciting.

They liked these simple whole numbers. So the ratio of three to two that produced this wonderfully consonant, in other words, very stable note together with the root, was very, very appealing to them. And so their Pythagorean scale was based on stacked fifths, based entirely on fifths, which works fine if you stay within a single octave and a single key,

but as soon as you'd depart from that, the notes start to get a little bit out of tune, as we might say, and discordant. So there are certain notes, the fifth, the third, the sixth, they're what we call constant. So they're stable. They sound like you don't need to go anywhere. Once you've played those two notes together, they're not pressing you in a certain direction.

But other notes, there's that dissonance, which can sound great. I mean, particularly if you like metal music, for example, it's all dissonant because it creates that tension all the time. So again, it's an emotional response. If you've got two notes together that are a little bit jarring, it works great, providing you then resolve to a more, you know, balanced series of notes. So in part, it's an emotional

response in the brain. But if you look at the waves, then the waves are very, when they combine together, are very simple in the case of consonants. And they don't work together very well in the case of dissonance. So there is a scientific and mathematical basis to consonants and dissonance. but there's also that reaction that we get, you know, in our own brains. So you mentioned there metal music and you were talking about the church and the kind of how music was a reflection of the sort of love and purity of God. So is it true that the church banned the tritone interval, and they called it the devil's interval?

Well, the devil's interval, that name came much later. It wasn't the church that sort of there. They didn't like dissonance in general. and quite a number of senior figures in the church would disparage this. And they say, no, you mustn't do. The popes would say they declare, mustn't have dissonance in your music, because that's an insult to God. But they didn't really come up with this idea of the devil.

They did think it was a bit, you know, it was too progressive for them, you know, especially the tritone, which is the most dissonant of intervals in our scales, you know. But it works perfectly for music where you want to go out of your way to create tension. But they didn't want to create tension back then. They wanted to be harmonious and pure, which was respectful to God in their eyes. So I suppose now anything goes.

We can play an interval we want. And that's what musicians do. It's what composers do. They experiment, yeah. So how about the notion of pitch then? Like at the moment, usually we tune A to 440 hertz. That's right. So why do we do that?

And that hasn't always been the case. No, well, it hasn't. And if you go back in time, of course, there was no easy way to measure pitch. The tuning fort was discovered in the 18th century. We were invented in the 18th century. And that's when you could first make it easy to, you know, tune an instrument to a particular frequency. Pitch and frequency are slightly different things.

Frequency is a scientific measure of how many waves per second. And pitch is more of a subjective response. to frequency. But back in the day, you got up to classical times, there was really no way to accurately tune an instrument. You would tune an instrument. If you had to play, for example, a liar with somebody who's playing a flute. Well, the flute's fixed. The holes are in a certain position. The guy can't suddenly change where the holes are, but the liar can be tuned to it. And the human voice is incredibly flexible. It can sing any note. So often these pictures were, especially if you had choral music, they would be arranged so that it was comfortable for the

singers. Now, you can't do that with a church organ. A church organ has got these gigantic pipes. You can't suddenly, you know, tweak the pitch of a church organ. It's impossible. You can do it, but it's a major enterprise, you know. The standardization of pitch took a long time. It didn't really happen until the early part of the 20th century, when, as you say, the concert pitch of A at 440 was accepted as a standard. Before that, it varied from country to country and even from region to region, because there wasn't this worldwide network of communication, so local standards would evolve. And they could be wildly different. It wasn't just that there were, you know, a little bit either side of 440. They could be, you know, 50 cycles per second away from

that, the standard note. And so it was only over time that, you know, as orchestras are moving around and musicians are moving around, they realize, well, we can't buy a new instrument every time we go to a different place to play. So that's how standardization came about. But it was a long process and it involved a lot of conflict and discussion. And it was only, as I say, in the early part of the 20th century, that 440 became the standard. Even now, some orchestras will not be tuned to 440. There might be 442, they might be, you know, 438 or something like that. They just have their own, but they know when they arrive at a place, that's how they're going to be. But 440 is what the accepted worldwide standard is now, yeah.

So sticking with pitch, something that's always really fascinated me is the idea of perfect pitch. Mm-hmm. So what is that? Well, this is when you can, if somebody says, well, sing me a G, for example, you know, possibly in this opt, you know, a G4, for example, the person can do that. You know, they can hit that note without any reference point, which is not possible for the vast majority of us. And it's generally thought that there has to be learned when you're young, very young.

You have to be almost trained to do this from early childhood. Otherwise, you're never going to get it. Now, if you play an instrument like a guitar, which has a definite tuning, you know, the high string, the low string are e. and if you tune your guitar correctly and you play a guitar often, you will get those notes in your head, and you can tell immediately whether the guitar is tuned properly or not. But that's a sort of a local example. Most of us can't sing a particular note.

We could sing relatively. It's interesting if you, you probably notice this when you sing happy birthday. You know, there's not a clue what everybody else is going to be singing. You just start, and then within the, you know, know, two seconds, everybody's clustered around whatever is, it seems most comfortable, you know, or suppose whoever's singing loudest or whatever. But nobody has a clue what note you're actually singing, you know, but somebody with perfect pitch could hit the note that, you know,

they wanted to sing happy birthday and said, happy birthday, we're going to sing it in C major, that person will be able to hit that note right away. But it's something that has to be learned early on. It's a sort of a language skill, you know, how difficult is it to learn a foreign language when you're 20 compared to when you're a toddler, you know. It simply doesn't happen. Absolute pitch is something that some people are born with. Others learn when they're very, very young. So let's move straight up to the current then.

So obviously these days we've got all sorts of synthesizers and electronic instruments that people use to make your music and computers. But what about the advent of AI? Well, of course this is evolving, isn't it, all the time? we don't know where it's going to go. We don't even know whether we really have control of it. But if I was a starting out musician today or any kind of creative artist, actually,

I would be very concerned because already you can ask an AI system to produce, say, pop songs, say, that sounds like Abba, for example, and give it a few guidelines, and it will do it. And it sounds fine. You can even synthesize the voices. and how far along do we want to go with this?

Because this is changing almost on a monthly basis. The sophistication of these things is changing all the time. The same as if you're an artist, you know, who is going to pay an artist to produce a particular picture if an AI system can do it in 30 seconds, you know? And so at some point, I think, people, governments have to make a decision how much AI is going to be allowed to come.

create and take other people's work, basically. And you know, this is a huge discussion right now, the fact that these systems are using other people's original work to produce new work, which is effectively plagiarism by another name. And it's a question of how it can happen, it will happen, that computers can produce entire symphonies that sound wonderful, but there's no human involved in it, or a new pop song that shoots the number one, one, it sounds great, you know, but no human element involved except what's been grabbed off the internet. Do we want that, you know, or should we flag it on every single thing so that you know if it's AI produced or not? I think it's very worrisome, quite frankly. We always think of

creativity as being a uniquely human thing, but that may not be the case in a few years' time. And now is the time to make that decision. Of course, the other thing is it's a financial thing. Like I say, if these things can be produced for next to nothing, companies are going to make money out of thin air, basically, just by using AI systems. We have a decision to make, you know, people, individuals. Are we going to sort of not buy AI stuff so that we support original musicians? Or are we just going to allow it to go ahead and take its own course? It's undetermined. We don't know.

Future's unknown. Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius, brought to you from the team behind BBC Science Focus. That was David Darling. To discover more about the topics we've just discussed, check out his book, A Perfect Harmony, Music, Mathematics and Science. If you liked what you just heard, then please do consider subscribing to Instant Genius on your preferred podcast platform.

If you'd like to see our guests and hosts in person, then please also check out our YouTube channel at Science Focus. The current issue of BBC Science Focus magazine is out now. Pick up a copy wherever you buy your favourite magazines or download us on your app store of choice. You can also find us on Apple News or online at sciencefocus.com. This podcast is sponsored by Name, Audio and Focal. The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal.

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