The evolutionary origins of music and their role in shaping culture

This page is for in-person tickets for this event - please see our separate page for online tickets.

This talk draws on archaeology, anthropology, linguistics, and the physics of sound to explore how the development of musicality may have influenced the evolution of human behaviour and culture.

Building on Darwin’s 1871 suggestion that song likely emerged before language, it examines the fundamentally musical nature of vowel sounds and traces several key phonemes—central to all languages—to the facial expressions associated with different emotional states.

The talk will conclude with a practical demonstration, offering participants the chance to experience and test this idea for themselves.

Nicholas Bannan studied music at Clare College, Cambridge University, and received commissions from several choirs, the Guildhall String Ensemble and the Grieg Quartet. He taught at the University of Reading and the University of Western Australia. His research focuses on the evolutionary origins of the human singing voice. He edited with George Odam The Reflective Conservatoire (Ashgate, 2005), and edited Music, Language, and Human Evolution (OUP, 2012). As a teacher, he developed the evolutionarily informed pedagogical system he named ‘Harmony Signing’, which led to the publications Every Child a Composer (Peter Lang, 2019) and First Instruments (OUP, 2020).

This event will be delivered both in-person and online. To book an online ticket,

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