Excellent point!

Enjoy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ND3dfvaHV20

I view Music as what it is at it's most fundamental - Mathematics. We can possibly say that Mathematics, including Music, is woven into the fabric of the Universe because we see it there. However I don't see how we can ever determine which came first objectively. "Chicken and the Egg" is absurdly childish and no-brainer by comparison, IMHO. I wrestled with this concept for much of my life because I love both Mathematics and Music and made most of my living employing both,...

... but one late night driving from a gig in the US SouthWest, being in the mountains there were no solid FM radio stations for very long so I was regularly resorting to "Scan". Out of the blue I hit upon a radio station from an Indian reservation that was about to air a celebratory music and dance performance of the tribe who owned the station. I got a bit excited because I love primitive music, music with all the "fat" trimmed off and down to basic, visceral, hypnotic form. I was shocked that I couldn't feel it at all. I mean nothing. It was actually embarrassing because as a professional musician who is predisposed to improv I assumed I could "dig anything". I think Mongolian throat singing is awesome. I love Indian Raga. I have records from the Smithsonian of various African and South American tribes that all but put me in a wonderful trance, but a tribe of North American Indians was absolutely alien to me. Maybe they just revel in a chaos that I can't get close to but I think what we call Music is an imposition of our sense of pattern applied to sound. When it fits our predisposition we call it Music. When it doesn't we call it noise. Some birds are called "songbirds" because they have patterns we enjoy. Others are raucous and crude noisemakers. I think this is prejudice, just as my reaction to one tribes Music was.

So I can't know objectively enough to be certain but I am leaning in favor of the concept that Music is a human construct. It may revolve around mimicry but what doesn't? It is, in my mind, an Art Form of Human Invention, and only slightly more important than it's cousin, Mathematics, and only then because there are far more human cultures with enough in common that Music requires little training to communicate and enjoy. In fact it can even exist to a degree interspecies. It strikes us whether we want it to or not. Math beyond the most fundamental expressions requires serious training just to experience, let alone to create with. I am willing to bet that a very hefty percentage of Humanity can whistle or hum a tune, but I'd bet less than 50% know what A^2 + B^2 = C^2 "sings" , possibly even the "tune" of D/Pi... although that is essentially the name of a REALLY great band.

Music and Math are "hardwired" into the Universe it exists in the smallest as well as the largest levels. enorbet, it may interest you that mathematics in also hardwired into the Chinese language, both ancient and "modern". An example is the frequency of autological characters.

OT but not really:
How The Chinese Language Makes Math Easier - Linguistic Analysis
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7jHT7Tumcw

As I mentioned I see no way to test that hypothesis, so hypothesis it must remain, in my view anyway.

I was moderately aware of the value of a language not based in a finite number of alphabetic characters that can be combined for additive meaning but I did not know the depth presented in that video possible because how numbers are designated. Since children often begin talking and counting things by age 2, that is a very serious advantage. Thank you. That was excellent. I was fascinated.

On a similar note, have you seen the Indian mental abacus "finger shaking" method of computation that facilitates working with very large numbers and highly complex operations? I really don't understand why that isn't taught everywhere. The benefits extend far beyond just math calculation.

It is more accurate to say that music is mathematical. Every element of music from pitch and tone to duration, volume and rhythm can be described and represented mathematically. Arrays and cadences do not describe different things, merely the same things in different contexts, using different vocabularies. Music and maths both describe systems of relationships, but music is no more about notes than maths is about numbers.

This is very common, and the reason for this is that you had no frame of cultural or empirical reference. Traditional music is imbued with and created via complex local, historical and psychological frameworks which represent themselves musically, meaning much to one person and nothing to another. This is why music is not a universal language: I can listen to Senegalese music as much as I can to a native speaking Urdu, but both mean nothing to me.

Probably better to call it ancient, early, folk, ritualistic or traditional. 'Primitive', in a musical sense, implies something entirely different and conjures up, for me at least, little other than images of cavemen banging rocks. It's one step away from calling it animist.

Music is definitely not a human construct. The definition of melody as music is human, but to say that music per se is a human construct is both incorrect and irrational. One only has to listen to bird or whalesong to see that music exists in nature, but the definition and theorisation of music [not to mention the cultural and subcultural interpretation of such] is human.

In which case it cannot be purely human. It is natural, just as human beings are part of nature.

Most people do know what it "sings", but they can't articulate it. Likewise the mathematical calculations required to, e.g. catch a ball or run across a busy road are highly complex, carried out by a process of natural mathematics which are different to academic or computational mathematics. But in essence I agree, the process is much more likely to be unidirectional.

Very well thought out post/response, Lysander, and I do get the connection to "how things actually are" vs/ "how we perceive them". I do have confidence that objective reality does exist, but that we only get to see a small set of samples from it... not quite as divisively as Platos Cave analogy characterizes it but not quite as "lock step" as Aristotle's viewpoint either. I don't dismiss the possibility that Math and Music are "woven into the fabric of the Universe". It is quite possible. I think it is also possible that Music is an associative, interpretive representation of how we perceive things. Because all animals with hearing actually have that sense as a benefit to survival, they too associate some sounds as threatening, non-threatening, and/or pleasurable. Some of this is instinctive and some, learned. Our pets know from repetition as well as instinct what human, especially their owner/companion humans, tone of voice reveals such temperament on a level that wild or mistreated strange animals cannot perceive or trust.

I think my example of how we classify song birds and noise birds has to do with subjective perception, not objective reality. I'm quite confidant that for example crows and magpies recognize both threats and pleasantries from other crows and magpies. Humans, OTOH, have a different association and level of experience. Crows and magpies feed on the dead so they have a certain level of instinctive recoil much like spiders and snakes. I know it isn't as simple as just these words convey, else why would many people find cats adorable given human history of experience with predatory cats, but we even find tigers beautiful at the same time we find them horrifying. It is complex.

Having spent considerable time and training in such things as The Quantum World mathematics, I am powerfully aware that The Universe on levels outside our frame of reference evades us and is not at all intuitive and such seemingly simple concepts as Infinity and Singularity are measures of the current limitations on not only what we "see" (or hear) but even what we can see. This is why I also cannot rule out that just as Mathematics is an invention (few other life forms have it, some, but few) so is Music and if it weren't then Music would on every level be utterly instinctive to all Life and it is obviously not.

A remaining small point is that I am obviously aware of cultural influence on Music but I disagree a bit on your conclusion that is all it is. I have spent many hours listening to and enjoying numerous artists, like Mongolian throat singers and to be more specific and adding actual words, Sigur Ros, for whom I do not understand a single word, but I get and love the Music. There is apparently something even more fundamental to what we like and don't like or what we label "music" or "noise". That may have to do with expectations and pre-judice but even that lends itself to invention as opposed to intrinsic.

In closing, I don't think anyone can say definitely it is one or the other since such a large component of it's acquisition and appreciation is entirely subjective, but that leaves me with only rather nebulous and unresolved speculation, as I think it does you and others as well, since we cannot completely escape our own Frames of Reference. We can see, test, confirm and deny attributes of the Quantum World but it can never become intuitive for humans. It's just too alien... yet it does exist.

Yes and it was/is fascinating. Regarding why it's not taught everywhere, I think it has to do with many people in power seeing the world as otherism, anything different from "us" becomes "them/they/other", ie: foreign, different, interesting but somehow less then what "we" do/have/offer etc... Sad really, "we" could be learning so much from each other instead of otherising each other.

"Birds from different species recognize each other and cooperate: Researchers show for the first time how birds from two different species recognize individuals and cooperate for mutual benefit"
https://www.sciencedaily.com/release...0521143827.htm
I've read elsewhere that Bluejays act as the alarm systems for other birds, they are most vocal when an intruder (or other unknown thing) is present.

I prefer to see Math and Music as revelations/discoveries rather then inventions. Mankind discovered what was already there and learned how to use it. I also think that if there is a "universal" language, mathematics is pretty darn close to it. Universal in every sense of the word.

Rudy Adrian - Moonwater
Rudy's music is art for your ears.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtPUZygE7Ys

same album:
Rudy Adrian - Summer Fields
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbLloIuSkeI

Piece Of My Heart
Piece Of My Heart
Piece Of My Heart (“Wow” for the mention of Janis Joplin)

Does anyone have a recommendation for artists similar to the Kingston Trio? Their folk songs are scratching some major itch right now.
Anyway, The Kingston Trio - Mark Twain.

Dust in the baggie


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFEZOjtrwls

I don't have any way to know if I'm "preaching to the choir" but since you asked - The Kingston Trio were very much "of a time". The early 60's was a boom for folk singing groups and there quite a few that had similarities to each other including them. If you check out that era from around 1960-1965 you're sure to strike gold. Most Rock 'n Roll had become sappy or silly High School Music (which is immortalized in The Animals' tune Bo Diddly that summed up the British Invasion that changed all that rather succinctly) and Folk was thought to be Collegiate.

Off the top of my head there was acts like Peter, Paul, and Mary and The New Christy Minstrels, but Bob Dylan began to change that group style playing traditional songs to the solo folk singer/songwriter which reflected the growing concern of "that war over there" that was so counter-productive.

Ooo, no I did not know that, thanks!
I've been on a strange stint the past weeks, both German and American folk music, banjo/bluegrass stuff, too.
It's...kinda good, hah.

But yeah, I had no idea, that time period is kind of nebulous to me. I shall research it.

I didn't mean to imply the trend was only in the US either. Here's a few from that era from Canada and it should be remembered that even Neil Young and othes got their start in that Folk movement, especially what was to become The San Francisco Sound in the later 60s.

Here's the names of a few notables -

Bruce Cockburn, Buffy Sainte-Marie, Ferron, Gordon Lightfoot, Joni Mitchell, Kate & Anna McGarrigle, Leonard Cohen, Murray McLauchlan, Stan Rogers, Valdy, Penny Lang, the The Rankin Family and Wade Hemsworth

and here's a sample

Ian and Sylvia
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjfTDPhMdTk

Gordon Lightfoot
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vST6hVRj2A