Before some Greek dudes put nice-sounding musical scales on a mathematical basis (octaves and other music theory concepts), music was either re-creating sounds from nature or stylized talking. It took a lot of experimentation and observation to find a musical system that consistently "resonated" with human emotion.
Are you sure about this? Can you post a reference?
My understanding is that the same sorts of scales (logarithmic, with any frequency f and f*2^n treated as equivalent pitches, usually with five or eight tones per octave, occasionally more) have arisen independently in just about every human culture, usually without a mathematical theory. I could be wrong, though.
You're off by a couple of millennia, the 'Wohl Temperierte Klavier' was only possible after some German dude called Werkmeister came up with a way to tune instruments across large ranges to allow them to play together.
That's where the math came in to it.
That other German 'dude' J.S. Bach then proceeded to cover the new possibilities exhaustively, see the music in the volume of the same name. The enormous jump music made in the relatively short span of 15 years or so during which this all happened is still quite unbelievable.
This makes about as much sense as claiming that before people figured out how to write and before linguists started codifying systems of grammar, all language was just unstructured simplistic animal utterances.
The irony of the pre-eminenct, western-only centered historical-musical view surrounding a McFerrin melody is thick as molasses. It's West African in rhythm, choral response, scale and spirit.
I don't think so. The Greek ideas have just survived, because they wrote a lot and their conquerors --- the Romans --- spread their stuff. Other cultures had well-developed music, too.
