The origin and evolution of music: Steve Pretty plays the conch

0:00Are all batteries the same? That's like asking if all soccer players are the same. Take Messi, the most decorated player ever. Is there any other player who has achieved that? No, just him. Now take Duracell. Is there any other battery with Power Boost ingredients inside? No, just Duracell. Remember, goats only trust goats because they're built different. And Messi only trusts Duracell. When did people first start using musical instruments and start singing? Very, very interested in where music comes from and why music even exists in the first place. And so then if you kind of distill that down and break that down right back to our early evolution, that's where you get instruments like the conch.

0:46And I'm kind of just fascinated by that instinct that we had to pick up these instruments and use them as tools of creative expression. That's what we're getting into today on this special episode of The World, The Universe and Us, all about the origin of music and the evolution of creativity.

1:03Can't help smiling. No, how could you not?

1:09I'm Dr. Rowan Hooper.

1:10Steve Pretty:And I'm Dr. Penny Sarchet. And our very special guest this week is the musician Steve Pritt. Welcome, Steve. Thank you very much. A musician in a new scientist's studio. Oh, we love it. Yes. Can we have another flourish? A little flourish? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, we'll see. I'll give you a little... Well, I'll tell you what. I'll do a little fanfare and I'll explain why in a bit.

1:34There we go. Explain why now. Explain why. Well, it's all to do with one of the reasons that I'm here, which is I've brought some shells in, and I'm a trumpet player, as you can tell, and I'm very, very interested in where music comes from and why music even exists in the first place. But as a trumpet player, I've become very obsessed with playing conch shells. It's sort of my midlife crisis. Some people buy Ferraris. I've got really into playing shells. I should actually say, especially as I'm on the New Scientist podcast, that it's not just conch shells. It's all sorts of different varieties of shells.

2:08Frog shells, Triton shells, conch shells. Okay. But they work in a very fundamentally similar way, the same way, really, as a trumpet. So that little fanfare I just played there, I didn't put my fingers down at all. I didn't play any. I didn't brush my vowels down. I see, yeah. And this is the same way that all these instruments work as well. OK, well, so that is we want to get onto the origin and evolution of music. And we always think, well, that's really hard to study because songs don't fossilise. But even so, there are aspects that we can study. We know that chimps can't sing, physically can't sing.

2:42My wife says I also can't physically sing. So that means we must know the ability to sing evolved after that common ancestor split from chimps, right?

2:52Steve Pretty:Yes, and there are fossils suggesting that some homonyms may have had the anatomy to control their voice around 1 million years ago. So that kind of gives us a hint about when we could have maybe gained that ability. But narrowing it down any further is a bit more difficult. But with instruments, they do fossilise, right? So you get these bone flutes, about 40 ,000 years old or so. So we know we can put a number on that. But then, as you say, we've got conches. And that's what we want to talk about. so let's hear a conch yeah you want to hear a conch well I've brought three in but let me just get this nice big one first so this is actually a Triton shell a very very beautiful shell and let me play it for you I'm going to back off the mic because it is loud

3:45wow but just going back to what we were saying just now about the about the way I played the fanfare. In fact, we're recording this just near to Remembrance Sunday and of course those fanfares are played on bugles traditionally, the last post, and that is a trumpet without any valves. And conches and other brass instruments work in exactly the same way, which is that we're working with the resonance of the instrument in order to be able to create different notes from that same mouthpiece, the same shell. And so I can get more notes. I can essentially play a fanfare on a conch in the same way. I've never understood how those trump, what do you call it?

4:25Bugles, yeah. Bugles, yeah. How you get so many different notes. How do you? Well, let me show you on this conch, right? So I go again.

4:42So what are you doing there? So I'm essentially, I'm speeding up the air. I'm speeding. So, of course, all sound is vibrating air. And what I'm doing is speeding up the air column, speeding up the vibrations of the air, using a combination of air pressure and vibrating lips. So slightly more sort of tension in my face, my embouchure, it's called. And that basically, what then happens, you can hear that it suddenly locks into a note. So I sort of missed it the first time.

5:12So it's not there. It's...

5:17And so those are the kind of fundamental resonant properties of the shell. And so that is exactly the same on the trumpet or any other brass instrument.

5:33So the trumpet is really just a piece of plumbing that's especially designed to accentuate those bits of the physics of a natural instrument like this. You can hear that those two notes are not necessarily very in tune, that the octave of these are not quite there. But yeah, there's then these other tones that I can keep going up. And the reason that you can play lots of notes on a bugle or on kind of early trumpets is that you're playing, as you get higher, the notes get closer together. so that the kind of overtone series gets closer together. And that means that you can then essentially, by the top, it's easy to demonstrate in the trumpet, you can play a whole scale with no vowels at all, with no buttons at all.

6:24So you can hear that's a fifth, a musical fifth. That's a fourth, and then third.

6:33And once we get up to here, you can start playing an entire scale with no vowels at all.

6:44So they get bigger the lower you are and smaller the higher you are. So an easier way to think about this might be on a guitar where the frets are very close together, the higher up the net you go, or a grand piano where you've got this sort of exponentially longer bass end than you have the high end, this big cut off. I see. And so it's that same principle, essentially. This message is sponsored by Vive Healthcare. In the global battle against HIV, science has given us incredible treatments that allow people with HIV to live long, healthy lives. Yet in many places, the stigma surrounding HIV is still so powerful that the fear of being discovered can outweigh the need for life-saving therapy.

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8:02Find it at newscientist.com slash VIIV. We should say that Steve is not best known for being a conch player. Not yet, not yet, but anyway.

8:13Steve Pretty:Still time. Well, we want to mention the brilliant Hackney Colliery band, Steve's band leader of them. He's also got a great podcast called Steve Pretty on the origin of the pieces. But yeah, we want to get into the evolution of music and you've got some gadgetry to get into with that, haven't you? Yeah, I have. I mean, one of the reasons I think I'm so obsessed with the evolution of music is it's a very strange thing to do with your life, making sort of weird noises out of bits of plumbing or then, you know, electronic toys or whatever else. I remember when my kids started nursery and I would go in and I think I would be slightly embarrassed to have to talk about what I did for a living because there'd be people here.

8:54I'm sure it's much more interesting than what most people do. I mean, I'm very, very lucky. I'm extremely lucky and I love it. I couldn't imagine doing anything else now. But it is a very strange way to spend your time making silly noises in a shed, basically, or in front of people. And I've always been obsessed with why that is. And much as I love lyrics and music with lyrics, I'm particularly interested in kind of abstract music. In other words, yeah, music without words put to it. And so then if you kind of distill that down and break that down right back to our early evolution, that's where you get instruments like the conch or again, the flutes you mentioned.

9:30And I'm kind of just fascinated by that instinct that we had to pick up these instruments and use them as tools of creative expression. And I think particularly what I find fascinating is the iterative process that that needs in order to create something. So you can't just pick up a shell and play it. And you have to, so what I do sometimes as part of my live shows is I have a hacksaw and a shell, because I have a whole load of shells at home, have a whole rack of them. And I cut the end, I make the shell live on stage and then play it. It's not a complicated process. And obviously back in the day that would have been done with a flint or whatever else.

10:08But it does, you can't just pick it up and play it. You do need to do some work to it. And of course, that presumably would have taken generations to work out. and then yeah then that kind of that evolution that same iterative process applies right the way through to the trumpet and everything else that we think of as music now you mentioned kids

10:25Steve Pretty:there and I always think when you look at young children the joy that they get from music it's hard not to think well there's something in us that completely sort of predisposes us to really get something that feels transcendent from musical expression exactly and also I think I'm also fascinated I talk about it a lot on the podcast about the different uses of music and the different functions that music has, whether it's ceremonial or whether it's just a purely messenger, sending messages in long distances. And again, coming back to the conscious, one of the reasons, the more I looked into these kind of primitive instruments, the more I found that they were used all over the world in lots of different ways.

11:06A lot of the ways that we use music now, so they're used as communication, they're used as ceremonial instruments. you know they're associated with all sorts of different things dancing even in some place and so there's something just you know having that shell having that thing that nature produces and that we as humans then adapt into a creative tool and every iteration that we go through we find you know a new tool of creative expression and humans have this incredibly complicated emotional lives and these tools of creative expression are there to you know to get out our feelings essentially I imagine that William Golding must have heard about this when he put the conch in Lord of the Flies.

11:49And we're talking about this, you know, the one that Ralph and Piggy use. So, yeah, but that's the first I'd heard of it. And all this history and culture of conch playing, I've never heard of that before. But it's incredible, isn't it? It's really interesting. And so I've spent quite a lot of time in India over the years and particularly with Tibetans. And the conch is a very important ceremonial instrument in Tibet. Now you think, where is Tibet? How do they get there? Exactly. It's landlocked, right? Yeah, exactly. And so they're incredibly important to Tibetan Buddhism. They're very, very important in Hinduism.

12:21They're obviously still used in the Pacific a lot. And similarly in Europe and America. So they're sort of found all over the world and used in a similar kind of way. But again, with different uses of music. So sometimes it's ceremonial, sometimes it's for communication. and so there's something sort of really pure about that and that kind of iterative process, the ultimate expression of that if you don't mind me explaining for a second is this, I think and this is a, just to describe it it's a white plastic conch this is a 3D printed shell and I find it, even though it essentially sounds the same as a regular conch there's something really fascinating about that iterative process that starts from our ancient ancestors picking up a shell and now, essentially, people like me or this bloke in Germany who made this one, laser scanning them, having to do all this very, very high-technologically advanced stuff to make these instruments and then printing them and iterating them.

13:23And I just play it and it sounds similar. So it's a similar idea, right? And again, that overtone, the series that I was talking about, comes through.

13:38It's the same sort of idea there. So, yeah, it's something that I find really fascinating. And I think one of the things about Shell instruments is that they have this enormous sound. We're in a very small kind of podcast studio now. And so although it does fill the room with sound, it's deliberately a very dead, sonically dead room, right? And so it's a good sound, but it doesn't really kind of move you, right? It's just a loud sound. I was lucky enough to spend a few hours overnight in the Natural History Museum in the Hintze Hall, where I recorded a load of these. And some in particular, in fact, this tiny one I've brought as well, I think it was this one.

14:18I played one note on this. I played this note.

14:25Just that little note. And the Hintze Hall, for some reason, and the resonance of that hall and that note, just the reverb was extraordinary and made the person I was with cry. just from that one note speaking about. And there's something, so there's something really, really interesting about where these instruments are played.

14:42Steve Pretty:So we've just done a feature at New Scientist on archaeoacoustics. And in that, there's talk of a 3 ,000-year-old temple or performance space in the Andes, I think. And apparently it has the exact resonant frequency as the conches that have been discovered there in excavations. So what would that mean? We talk about it sort of enhances the sensory experience, but what would that feel like? Would it be reverb? Yeah, essentially. So it's reverb, but rooms have different kind of standing waves where particular frequencies resonate particularly well. So I'm going to a classical concert tonight at the Royal Festival Hall.

15:20Those spaces are, of course, designed for orchestral music, and they work incredibly well for that. They don't work so well, and I've played there with jazz projects and things. I mean, it's cool. It works okay. but it's not what they're designed for, you know. And so some, and for example, church gigs, as someone who plays music that often has loud drums in it, playing in a church can be quite challenging because everything gets muddied up. Whereas the choral music is very much designed to be sung in a church. And in fact, they kind of co-evolved, if you don't mind me using the word, evolved in that way.

15:57Like they co-evolved the music that people were writing for churches were written for those spaces and the churches were designed for that and so on and so they kind of these different approaches to our kind of sonic perception evolved together so the technology of the instruments and technology of the rooms so one of the things i do live um a lot and in fact i'm i'm just working on an album of this stuff as well is to try and kind of recreate that sense of the sublime i suppose that sense of sort of that i think of course it's all conjecture but that our ancient ancestors might have felt when they were in these very resonant spaces um there's another some other interesting examples of caves where the bouncing sound waves off the wall a former kind of rhythm right yeah so that you know they bounce off one ball and then that bounce off the other and that little rave going exactly exactly but when i'm playing these things in you know uh here or in festivals or wherever you can't create that you can't create that You can with this.

16:56Exactly. So that's why I have some electronic toys in front of me. But actually, it sort of feels like these ancient instruments and modern instruments are very different. But I see them as part of the same continuum. Continuum, yeah. Because here we're manipulating what nature's given us with a shell, and here we're manipulating basically electrons or ones and zeros. And it's a similar principle where we're trying to sort of bend. Let's have a go. Yeah, let's have a little go. It's funny because when you were talking about it, At first I was thinking of it as a religious kind of experience that you get.

17:28And like you talked about your friend crying and being so moved. But then there's also there is the party function.

17:35Steve Pretty:The release, the sort of group bonding. We'll perhaps get on to this, but like the social cohesion hypothesis for music and bringing everyone together in a common purpose. Well, I mean, I'm a great believer in that we don't need to choose one of the reasons that music evolved. and again I think it speaks to the different uses we have of music even now whether it's dancing or whether it's ceremonial music or or even like elevated music or you know these all have different functions and I find it and actually one of the things I found about doing this stuff um these is I kind of think of them as sound baths rather than rather than conventional gigs and so at festivals uh when I've been doing it people are lying down and it's sort of like a meditation meditation really which is very different you need that at a festival don't you you really need it well that's the thing it's the opposite of what I would normally want from a festival gig my audience lying down but actually for this it's really it's really really nice and the project is called Shell Electronica there's a website shellectronica.com where you can hear some more of this but let me see if I can get a little just very mini version of it going now

18:47Thank you.

19:17Thank you.