Are you a man ... or a fish?

Our ears were once gills!

I was blown away when I first came across that idea.  (R)Evolutionary!

The gills that our ancestral fish used to breathe became, over time--as in millions of years--the middle ear and the eardrum and everything else that makes hearing possible.

A few hundred years ago, anybody even thinking along these lines would have been put away in a mental institution because the idea seems so far-fetched.  Yet, this fact is another example of evolution.

Of course, the incremental building up from our evolutionary ancestors makes the the ear and the hearing mechanism so darn convoluted.  And to then think that this entire anatomy exists only to collect information that is processed by the brain that we then recognize as sounds, from cacophony to melody.  The complex human brain deals with the information collected and even fills in the blanks without us knowing.

From a fish gill!

And then to think that there is a matter of personal preference about the sounds that we hear.  Music to one can be noise to another.

I still recall the elders referring to the popular film songs of my teenage years literally as noise (சத்தம்.)  An old friend in India a long time ago referred to Billy Joel's music as heavy metal.  Imagine that!  Years ago, I was playing an opera CD at home when a friend came by. She requested me to shut the music off because she couldn't stand sopranos! Wonderful music to one can easily be horrible noise to another.

While there is a biological explanation for the evolution of gills to ears, and for how we hear, music that we listen to is not a biological necessity.  Why do we have music?

It stems from a creative urge to find patterns in the sounds, in the noise.

It’s an act of rhythm, in tune with the body’s beating heart. From the earliest days on the savanna, humans scream, they shout, they hiss. They clap their hands, they stomp feet. They create noises to chase away adversaries—threatening intruders and imaginary spirits alike.

In the savanna, with various sounds all around, I imagine that there was a survival-urge to make sense of the surrounding noise.  That and our ability to imagine created music.

Music has those primal roots.

Ultimately, music challenges us to face ambiguity, seek solutions and, in the absence of resolution, turn confusion into a positive emotion by reveling in its ambiguity and vagueness. Looking back, noise has been integral to music as long as music has existed, incorporating imitations of birdcalls, animal sounds, and the cries of street vendors. It sounds ironic to say that indulging in noise is how we manage it. But apparently that is how humans shake, rattle, and roll. The visceral, disorienting response of sound’s interaction with the body is what—quite literally—moves us.

All from fish gills!