MUSICAL ORIGINS: SOUND OFF

(“Where Did Music Come From?”, July/Aug 2021)

In response to “Where Did Music Come From?”, I was thinking about this topic recently when a song I hadn’t heard in years (actually, at least a couple of decades) played on the radio and I immediately remembered the words to the song. To my non-scientific mind, this seems to imply that there’s a biological adaptation to music, or even that music/vibrations are an essential part of who we are. I would enjoy hearing the “auditory cheesecake” followers’ response to this particular phenomenon. Nancy Dietrich

The article “Where Did

Music Come From?” reminded me of something I tell people, whether they want to hear it or not: A highly intelligent and advanced race of extraterrestrials, after observing Earth for many decades, would decide they would never understand music, laughter and baseball. Alan Dyer

In “Where Did Music Come From?”, there is a paragraph which states (in part): “These days music is a profession, but even ‘ordinary mortals who never had a music lesson have implicit knowledge of the structure of the music of their culture,’ says Sandra Trehub, a psychologist at the University of Toronto. They may not know an arpeggio from an interval, but they can keep a beat, copy a pitch and move their bodies to sound.”

As someone with absolutely no sense of rhythm, who cannot sing a note on key if my life depended on it, and who is a hazard to everyone else on a dance floor, I take great umbrage at being excluded from the class of “ordinary mortals.” Edwin J. Bailen