Where do songs come from?

An ode to the mystery, divinity, and ancient history of music.

This is a part of Cosmic Junkyard, a biweekly newsletter about the world’s most interesting unanswered questions. Thank you so much for reading.

Where do songs come from?

Do they come from the wind? From the singing breeze? From the hum of the birds dancing on currents, spinning up towards the infinite sky?

Do they come from water? Do they come from the rhythmic dance of the the tides, the low cymbal-crash of wave on shoreline, the bass-beat humming up of the airless deep below?

Do they come from fire? The crackle and hiss of flame, the pop of sparks, the melodic press of heat humming as warm as a cello, as nimble as a harp?

Do they come from the earth? From the frequencies reverberating from every living thing, drawn from the particles vibrating at the very core of all matter?

Do they come from deep space? From the low boom of a black hole? Was the first thing in existence the sound of some particle splitting open, some cosmic crackle that sang and hummed us all into being?

Do songs come from somewhere deep within us? Are they something instinctual, something inherited? After all, humans naturally know the difference between major and minor chords; we are born with this knowledge, and we know that a minor chord invokes melancholy and we know that a shift to major brings sweet relief, sunshine, and joy.

Song is our birthright. And so is singing.

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Nobody knows exactly where the first music originated, though scientists have found bone flutes made of mammoth ivory which they have dated back to 40,000 BCE. It is likely that instruments date back much further than this, though these were probably made of materials that have since decomposed.

The oldest remaining musical instrument is a flute made of crane bones, found in central China. Many ancient Chinese leaders were buried with musical instruments in their tombs, possibly just in case they needed the help of song on their journey into the beyond.

The earliest songs were, of course, not written. They remain lost in time, though perhaps we still carry bits of those ancient tunes deep within us. Perhaps they live on in certain songs we still sing around campfires today.

As for the earliest instruments: hunter-gatherers may have initially started banging on objects to signal to each other as they traveled; these sounds may have been the first drums.

One thing is clear. At some point, someone somewhere heard a drumbeat and began, for the first time, to dance.

And at some point, somewhere, someone sang for the first time — sang or hummed quietly to their child or their loved one, or perhaps imitated the cry and call of a bird.

And at some point, somewhere, perhaps gathered around a fire under limitless stars, people began to drum and sing together, and they felt it, that joy we all still feel when we sing — that timeless and infectious wonder, that magic of song.

Yet even before this, the earth still sang. The wind still cried. The birds chirped. They still do, and will long after we humans have gone from this place.

Most of the early music we do know about relates to religion. Song has always been used as a vehicle for connecting to the divine, be it God or the Earth or, as is often the case with the carefully preserved songs of many Indigenous cultures, a mesh of both. Music was also used for healing by physicians across many ancient cultures.

The first written music we know of is the Hurrian Songs, a collection of hymns written on cuneiform tablets found in the Amorite-Canaanite city of Ugarit, now northern Syria, dating to approximately 1400 BC. These were invocations to Nikkal, a Mesopotamian goddess who may have been the consort of the god of the moon.

The ancient Egyptians considered music to be a divine gift from the gods, and often used it for healing purposes. Vedic texts also frequently invoked music, naming mantras as key ways to embody divinity and to unlock various wishes, miracles, and transcendent states of being.

In ancient Greece, music was considered key to the understanding of philosophy, mathematics, and the cosmology of the universe, and the philosophy of musica universalis, or music of the spheres, proposed that the movements of the planets and celestial bodies is itself a form of music. In this framework, the whole universe is a symphony, always singing, bending towards harmony.

But long before all this ritual, rite, notation, and theory, someone somewhere began to sing. Someone began to bang a stick on a rock. Someone strung up a reed to a tree, and noticed it vibrated when plucked.

Music may have originated at the same time as language. It may have been initially used as a form of seduction or communication.

Many religions propose that music was a gift of the gods. For many of us today — myself included — music is one of the most sacred parts of this life on Earth.

“If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph: The only proof he needed for the existence of God was music,” Kurt Vonnegut said, and I’d have to agree.

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Lately I have spent many nights sitting around fires, singing along to devotional songs at the farm I am living at in Guatemala. I have also been able to hear many ancient songs — mantras and hymns and and medicine songs gifted from Indigenous tribes in the Amazon rainforest. I have spent many nights lately been soaking in these ancient, often sublimely simple melodies.

Not coincidentally, I have also been writing many songs, too, the music and words flowing through me like rivers. I don’t know where the songs are coming from. I only know I must make myself receptive to them, must open my heart to them, must allow myself to be a vessel for them. Lately they seem to fall into my hands like raindrops, pouring over my guitar strings.

I do believe there is a great unified field of song and creative flow that exists just beyond sight. I do believe there is a web that connects all things, and I believe that web is a song.

So where does music come from? Where did song begin?

There are no answers, only the truth of the matter, which is that song is everywhere around us and within us.

We are song. We are music. We all have a place in the great symphony of the universe.

So why not sing?