Can you imagine living a life without ever hearing the blissful sound of music? Sounds unlivable, right? When you really think about it, music is the soundtrack that inspires and accompanies every moment of our lives. From our birthdays, to weekends shared with friends and family, to the moment you learned something new; melodies are always there accompanying us. Furthermore, it goes without saying that the importance of music isn’t anything new. From the beginning of time, human beings have discovered the power of sound and have perfected it to the point where we are capable of creating the most melodious tunes that assimilate the art you can hear. Therefore, music has inspired many moments in history and has shaped cultures and societies from all around the world. Today we will look at a brief history of music and dive further on the impact this art has had on us as human beings throughout time.

 

As mentioned before, music is and has been an essential aspect of humanity’s history since the beginning of time because of its impactful influence upon us; therefore, the story of music, in a way, can also be interpreted as the story of us humans. First of all we need to determine what exactly music is. According to the Merrimam-Webster dictionary, music is “an arrangement of sounds having melody, rhythm, and usually harmony”. Based on this, the earliest humans started creating music and a variety of different musical instruments to accompany it 40,000 years ago, during the Paleolithic Era. The most ancient musical instruments found to this day are rudimentary flutes made from animal bones and look-alike drums made from rocks and wood. Still, if we look at music as the art of controlling pitch, then its history would also coincide in the Middle Paleolithic Era when Neanderthals already had the vocal anatomy to “sing” like us. Moving forward, the art of creating music was then perfected with the creation of musical notation, the famous “do, re, mi”, we use nowadays. The earliest form of musical notation was found to be at about 1400 BC in Babylonia. Yet, some argue that the mathematical organization of music was actually created by the Ancient Greeks since they have shown to be the first to look into the numerical relationship between music intervals. But the “do, re, mi” we all know and love was actually created by Guido de Arezzo who developed the solfège system in the 11th century. Afterwards, the most recognizable classical musicians were born: Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, and Chopin, with their influence still being present these days. 

 

Nowadays, the influence of music has grown to such a degree that the idea of being a full-time working musician is no longer far-fetched. There are thousands of aspiring artists with amazing talent, and even more international icons from a whole array of different musical genres. You have Harry Styles, Doja Cat, Ariana Grande, Bruno Mars, The Weeknd, Lady Gaga, and many more, all of them with their own unique and catchy style that follows a specific genre such as jazz, pop, classical, reggae, electronic, R&B, indie, among many others. Here we can see the explosive evolution music has had throughout time, where it all started with simple rudimentary instruments and has now developed into its own moving and evolving organism full of flavor. 

 

But, why has music persisted throughout all of humanity’s existence, all the way from the Paleolithic era? My personal theory is what I mentioned in the introduction: music shapes people’s lives and allows us to express ourselves as human beings in a way speech doesn’t normally allow. Furthermore, music has shown to bring people together. Whenever music starts playing people usually come together to dance along with the melodious tunes of the moment. This is why music has persisted for so long and why it is still such a key part of culture everywhere. In other words, music has shown to give life an audible flavor that, otherwise, would make living bland and uninteresting. The same goes with art or language, it allows us to portray our humanity and through that we can actually live, connect and bond with each other in ways that probably wouldn’t be possible without the presence of these arts. 

 

In conclusion, music has had a really long history, going back more than 40,000 years! From there it has grown and developed to the point where, in the present day, there are thousands of musical genres, styles, and artists. And, even though it had its origin thousands of years ago, music still plays a crucial role in our current society and our culture because of its unconscious impact upon our lives and our relationships.