
The oldest song in the world - MiriamWeiner
http://www.bbc.com/travel/story/20180424-did-syria-create-the-worlds-first-song
======
cobbzilla
This is very cool. But calling it the "oldest song" is a bit of a stretch.
Maybe one could call it the "oldest song in history", since it is the oldest
song we have found written down, but certainly not the oldest song of all
time.

At least according to a Netflix documentary on India, there are some brahmins
outside Kerala that have been chanting the same song since before the
invention of speech. The claim is that the chant makes no sense in any
linguistic or even musical tradition and is more closely related to birdsong,
indicating a pre-oral genesis.

I think this particular example is a bit far-fetched, but it's not outside the
realm of possibility for an older, oral-tradition song to have survived, in
some form, to the present day.

~~~
danans
> At least according to a Netflix documentary on India, there are some
> brahmins outside Kerala that have been chanting the same song since before
> the invention of speech. The claim is that the chant makes no sense in any
> linguistic or even musical tradition and is more closely related to
> birdsong, indicating a pre-oral genesis.

That's Michael Wood's documentary about India if I recall correctly. However,
the implication of that segment was not that it represents a pre-speech
musical pattern, but rather that contains uninterpretable elements that might
be onomanopaeic. The first modern humans to arrive in India arrived speaking
languages as fully developed as any we have today, as they diverged from the
same fully verbal Africans as everyone else in the world.

EDIT: Here is an answer from the series' website where Wood himself admits
that they sacrificed clarity for drama's sake in their description:
[http://www.pbs.org/thestoryofindia/ask/answers_2.html#q3](http://www.pbs.org/thestoryofindia/ask/answers_2.html#q3)

What makes the Kerala birdsong chanting unusual is that it is systematic
despite having no obvious denotative meaning, unlike the rest of Vedic hymns
which directly rendered in the Vedic language [1].

Also, it _only_ occurs in Kerala. Vedic recitation elsewhere in India does not
include the birdsong element - rather it contains only the Vedic language
hymns.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vedic_Sanskrit](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vedic_Sanskrit)

~~~
jaldhar
That’s not completely true. There are wordless melodies associated with
Samavedic recitation all over India. For instance my Guruji knew a particular
set and we are Gujarati Brahmanas. However in Kerala they have a specific
Shakha of the Sama Veda (“branch” i.e. school of recitation) which is unique.

The idea that any of this is “pre-speech” sacrifices clarity to the point of
utter misinformation.

~~~
danans
That's a fair point. After all many Vedic recitations are replete with
syllables whose purpose is strictly musical/mystical and without concrete
meaning, the most famous being of course "AUM", but also the sequence "shrim,
hrim, klim, glaum, gam".

If you peruse the book that Michael Wood cites in that comment, you'll find
many other Vedic examples of meaningless musical particles like "ha bu" and
"bham bham".

Conversely, in the Indian pakhawaj drum composition recitation system (of much
more recent vintage than Vedic chanting), there is a form called Paran where
the opposite takes place: The semantically meaningless, but rhythmically
sophisticated patterns of drum syllables are overlayed and interspersed with
phonologically and rhythmically similar words drawn from Sanskrit, usually
descriptions of a deity. The words in this case play second fiddle to the
structure of the musical composition. Here is an example:

[https://youtu.be/hJg4NOCKTZI?t=443](https://youtu.be/hJg4NOCKTZI?t=443)

The Michael Wood documentary, while overall pretty decent, unnecessarily
exoticizes it in the example of the Kerala Brahmins, but you see very similar
phenomena (melodic meaningless syllables) in popular and folk music around the
world today, from India to Motown. In fact, there's a vocal technique from
Jazz called scat-singing, that exclusively uses meaningless syllables:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scat_singing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scat_singing)

------
spodek
Human remains go back in Africa 300,000 years and they're suggesting the
oldest song is around 3,400 years old?

Did I miss something? Are they suggesting the first song was also written? ...
that there weren't songs before they started writing them?

I think they mean the oldest musical notation.

~~~
GuiA
The title is terrible, and was probably changed by a clueless editor at BBC.

If you read the actual article though, 2 paragraphs in:

 _”Inscribed on it were lyrics, and underneath them is what researchers
believe is the earliest example of musical notation anywhere in the world.”_

~~~
macawfish
Sometimes it feels like editors write headlines with an explicit goal of
riling people up. Specifically riling _me_ up.

~~~
owlmirror
That's exactly what they are doing. It's not even a secret or anything.

------
danans
The song itself (rendered by a singer in the video on the page) reminds of a
lot of non-western music, in particular the distinctive minor harmonic 7th
that is so common from southern and Eastern Europe through the Middle East to
South Asia. I've also heard Jewish cantors in synagogues using it.

Someone once described this very general style of modal music to me as
"Alexandrian" music, because variations on it appear in many places where
Alexander the Great's army went.

Of course, the musical style probably far predates Alexander, as Alexander was
himself following routes established long before his time.

~~~
doesntmatter
The tune in the first video at about 1:14 is indeed used in Jewish synogogues.
Particularly those of Middle Eastern / North African Jewish communities.

As this video demonstrates:
[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lGh2hfk8NvY](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lGh2hfk8NvY)

------
tabtab
How are they sure about the notes of the melody itself? The Greeks used
Pythagorean tuning, which is based on mathematical fractions, allowing us to
know the exact ratios of the notes to each other. How would they get similar
precision from pre-Greek notations?

------
arca_vorago
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QpxN2VXPMLc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QpxN2VXPMLc)

------
Odenwaelder
... or is it just a tribute?

