Pondering Thoughts With Martin Ochoa

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Martin Ochoa, Staff Writer

On this week’s edition of Pondering Thoughts I decided to comb through the history of music. I know there’s hundreds of different types of music today we’re going to be looking at drums, singing/humming, and the piano, starting with drums.

Examples of ancient drums trace back millennia throughout Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Among the earliest known examples of percussion instruments are idiophones made from mammoth bones found in present-day Belgium. These instruments are thought to date from 70,000 B.C. and are idiophones, which means they produce sound via the vibration of the entire instrument.

Next up is the Piano The piano was invented by Bartolomeo Cristofori (1655-1731) of Italy. Cristofori was unsatisfied by the lack of control that musicians had over the volume level of the harpsichord. He is credited for switching out the plucking mechanism with a hammer to create the modern piano in around the year 1700.

Last but not least is singing, No one knows who invented singing. No historical evidence exists to tell us exactly who sang the first song, or whistled the first tune, or made the first rhythmic sounds that resembled what we know today as music. But researchers do know it happened thousands of years ago.