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Subject: 9,000 year-old oldest fully playable flute found in China.

Excerpted from FOX NEWS by Amanda Onion:
(Full story also written up in current "Nature" magazine)

NEW YORK --Long ago in China, someone picked up the hollow wing bone of
a crane, smoothed the edges and bored seven holes along one side.
  Then, perhaps to correct for an off-key note, they drilled an even
smaller hole beside the last.
  Last month and 9,000 years later, a musician picked up the same
ancient instrument and played a Chinese folk song --using that extra,
pitch-correcting hole.
  It played perfectly.
  "The guy [not a woman?--BF] had obviously spent a lot of time on it,"
said Garman Harbottle, a chemist at the Brookhaven National Laboratory
in Long Island who wrote about the ancient flute in this week's journal,
Nature.  "He didn't want to throw it away, so he found a way to correct it."
INTUITIVE DESIGN
  "Most significantly, Garman Harbottle says the seven notes on the
instrument comprise a nearly accurate octave.
  "Robert Fink, a musicologist in Saskatchewan, Canada, points out that
in nearly every other matter -- money, distance and time -- humans divide
things into units of ten. It's only in music that cultures have settled on
octaves -- a range of seven notes with the first note repeated at the end
--  to arrange their music.
  "'The nature of sound, itself, is what ends up cutting the steps out
of the continuum of sound for us,' Fink said. 'It overrides the  usual
desire to make things equal.'
  "One of the most compelling pieces of  evidence that music is
intuitive lies in the design of what is thought to be the oldest instrument
ever recovered. In July, 1995, a Slovenian archaeologist found a
43,000-year-old fragment of a bear femur bone in a cave in northern former
Yugoslavia.
  "Carved into the bone were two complete holes in the middle and two
partial holes carved at each of its broken ends. The distance between the
holes indicated that Neanderthals once played [notes of] the same musical
scale -- known as the diatonic or do re me scale -- that is used today....."
-------------------------------------------------------------

Excerpted from ASSOCIATED PRESS
By JOSEPH B. VERRENGIA AP Science Writer

  Archaeologists in China have found what is believed to be the oldest
still-playable musical instrument: a 9,000-year-old flute carved from the
wing bone of a crane.
  When scientists from the United States and China blew gently through
the mottled brown instrument's mouthpiece and fingered its holes, they
produced tones unheard for millennia, yet familiar to the modern ear.
  "It's a reedy, pleasant sound, a little thin, like a recorder," said
Garman Harbottle, a nuclear scientist who specializes in radiocarbon dating
at Brookhaven National Laboratory on New York's Long Island.
  Harbottle and three Chinese archaeologists published their findings in
today's issue of the journal Nature.  The flute was one of several instruments
to be uncovered in Jiahu, a excavation site of Stone Age artifacts in
China's Yellow River Valley....
  "You would never have one of these flutes in a symphony. But clearly,
these people knew what an octave sounded like," Harbottle said. He said the
flute can make what sounds like a 'do-re-mi' scale. It even has a tiny hole
drilled near hole No. 7, apparently to correct an off-pitch tone.
  That the flutes were made of durable bone rather than bamboo, as later
flutes were, also suggests they were culturally important, and not mere
amusements. In fact, some scholars believe the Chinese written character
for "sound" is a stylized representation of a vertical flute held in the
mouth.
--------------------------------

FURTHER COMMENTS ON THE RECENTLY FOUND ANCIENT CHINESE FLUTE SOUNDS
By Bob Fink, author of "Neanderthal Flute Musicological Analysis"

  The equal-spacings on the latest 9,ooo year-old Chinese flute cannot
play do, re, mi perfectly in tune -- as indicated by Garman Harbottle.
However, its musical intervals do sound very close to the do, re, mi
[diatonic] scale.
  The reason it is not in perfect tune with the scale is likely because,
as is common with many ancient flutes, the holes are fairly equally spaced
for finger-width convenience and/or esthetics (and possibly as a form of
temperament to better match other different-sized instruments or
voice-ranges).
  This human tendency to space things equally seems to have been
overcome in the UNequal hole spacings found in the Neanderthal flute
remnant (and also in more modern simple flutes and whistles). Unequal
spacings are required to perfectly match the do, re, mi scale in simple
flutes.
  However, it is well-established in musicology literature including up
to present fieldwork, that singers, in the same culture in which is found
an equal-spaced instrument, when they accompany the instrument, will sing
their intervals perfectly or acoustically in tune, despite the slightly
off-tune instrument. This practice probably existed in the past considering
how widespread it is today.
  This, plus the actual sound-sample published with the report of the
find, and the fact that the makers of these old flutes divided the octave
yet again into a 7-note scale, strongly indicates the following:
  When numerical systems otherwise tend to 5's and 10's [as per our own
toes & fingers] these ancient flutemakers probably felt pressed, by
subliminally-heard acoustic sound structures (intervals naturally created
by the overtones of played notes) to somewhat match diatonic intervals within
the octave, tolerating the slightly off-tune result from equal-spaced flute
holes.  Using 5 or 10 hole divisions of the octave might be in the arithmetic
traditions of things, but this won't work well for an attempted match to
musical scales and acoustics.
[Pix of flutes and/or citation about singers vs. instruments sent on
request]
------------------------------------------------------------------------

GREENWICH c/o Candace Norton
516 Avenue K South
Saskatoon, Saskatchewan., Canada S7M 2E2
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