'Violinists and violists transport their bodies—and listeners along with them—into the deep past of our identity as mammals, an atavistic recapitulation of evolution.'
Music from an instrument pressed into our jaw: These sounds take us directly back to the dawn of mammalian hearing and beyond. Violinists and violists transport their bodies—and listeners along with them—into the deep past of our identity as mammals, an atavistic recapitulation of evolution.
One bone became particularly useful as a hearing device, the hyomandibular bone, a strut that, in fish, controls the gills and gill flaps. In the first land vertebrates, the bone jutted downward, toward the ground, and ran upward deep into the head, connecting to the bony capsule around the ear. Over time, freed from its role as a regulator of gills, the hyomandibula took on a new role as a conduit for sound, evolving into the stapes, the middle ear bone now found in all land vertebrates .
When I lifted the violin to my neck and felt its touch on my jawbone, my mind filled with imaginings of ancient vertebrates. These ancestors heard through their lower jaws as vibrations flowed from the ground, to jaw and gill bones, to the inner ear. The violin drew me into a reenactment of this pivotal moment in the evolution of hearing, without the indignity of prostrating myself. High art meets deep time? Not in my incapable hands, but certainly in the artistry of accomplished musicians.
If music is sensitivity and responsiveness to the vibratory energies of the world, then it dates back nearly 4 billion years to the first cells. When sound moves us, we are also united to bacteria and protists. Indeed, the cellular basis of hearing in humans is rooted in the same structures, cilia, possessed by many single‑celled creatures, a fundamental property of much cellular life.
Sonic evolution without aesthetic experience has little diversifying power. Aesthetic definitions of music, then, are biologically pluralistic, unless we make the unsupported and improbable assumption that experiences of beauty are uniquely human.