By Ronna Porter.
I remember, on reading Steven Mithen’s excellent book The Singing Neanderthals – The Origins of Music, Language, Mind and Body last year, thinking that it would make a great episode of Melvyn Bragg’s BBC Radio 4 programme, In Our Time. While I’d still like to hear Bragg’s push back to Steven Pinker, in justification of why he views music as mere ‘auditory cheesecake,’ and learn from Alison Wray why she beleives so strongly that human linguistic evolution was predated by a musical evolution, the next best thing is an ABC Radio National panel discussion interviewer Natasha Mitchell had with ethnomusicologist Catherine Falk, psychologist Laura-Lee Balkwill, and neurologist Ani Patel. I won’t summarise the interview here as Luke Razzell does such a great job of it here.
Must get around to writing up my review of Singing Neanderthals, and reading Daniel Levitin’s This is your Brain on Music: The science of a human obsession, both of which are referenced in the audio transcript …