Helsinki ISME Conference, 2020 (original) (raw)

Songs have long been the means for people to create and celebrate their identity; it's a human thing, according to hymnwriter John Bell. as any singer knows, the act of singing the song produces a spiritual connection with the surrounding situation be it the open air, a classroom or a house of worship. During this time of pandemic anxiety and confusion, singing has been effectively banned as a colossal conduit for infection. There's been much discussion, anger and disbelief with the constraints placed upon this social and singular method of communicating. The body of this paper deals with this aspect of humanity and its agency. Though we are inactive at the moment, none of the means for effective social connection to spirituality through singing have changed. The evolution and development of music-making and its relationship to language and the metaphysical have puzzled and challenged researchers of all scientific disciplines. Darwin's observations on music-making deal mostly with the sounds of a variety of species made during what humans would term highly emotional times, i.e.danger, mating, care of the young. He suggests that a deep principle of inherited associations enable musical tones to call up strong emotions of a long past age, however vague or indefinite. Darwin proposed that the evolution of singing and that of language were closely related. He thought that speech evolved from singing. Within the modern sciences, Studies in music-making have been numerous, but hardly conclusive. In A Million Years of Music, Gary Tomlinson states, "Musicking came about via capacities that enabled the formalization of protomusic, protolanguage, and protodiscourse. The