Ejercicio 1 — Text A: Who Invented Music?
Comprensión escrita7 puntosText A
Who Invented Music?
No historical evidence exists to tell us exactly who sang the first song, or whistled the first tune, or made the first rhythmic sounds that resembled what we know today as music. But researchers know it happened thousands of years ago. The earliest civilizations throughout Africa, Europe and Asia had music. Back then, many believed it was a divine creation, a gift from the gods.
Some scholars say singing was the first kind of musical sound. Not that people back then were humming full songs. Instead, they made simpler vocal sounds – perhaps just a few notes combined. If that’s true, perhaps early humans began to speak and sing at about the same time. Why did they sing? Maybe they had an impulse to imitate something beautiful, like bird sounds. Vocal imitations of other animal sounds, however, may have been used for hunting, like a modern-day duck call. It’s also possible singing was a way to communicate with infants and toddlers, like early versions of lullabies. But again, people were not singing melodies or songs; our modern lullabies evolved throughout centuries.
Archaeologists have helped musicologists to learn about ancient musical instruments from the artifacts they’ve uncovered. For example, they have found flutes and whistles made of bone, pottery and stone. When the scientists measured how much carbon-14 was left in the flutes – which were made from the bones of large birds – they discovered some of the instruments were more than 30,000 years old! Musical instruments could also be associated with different types of people. Farmers played the syrinx, a small instrument that was easy to take into the fields. The aulos was a more sophisticated wind instrument: typically preferred by poet-musicians, it took more skill to play it.
Adapted from “Who invented music? The search for stone flutes, clay whistles and the dawn of song,” The Conversation, October 10, 2022. <https://theconversation.com/who-invented-music-the-search-for-stone-flutes-clay-whistles-and-the-dawn-of-song-185285>