More than 35,000 years ago, a hollow vulture bone with five holes in it became the world’s first known musical instrument. It was discovered recently in a cave in Germany.

“To make the step from just breathing to actually producing a sound requires a different sense of self,” Sato Moughalian, a professional flutist, told Daniel Wakin of The Times, speaking of those early cave dwellers.

As that sense of self evolved, so did the technology to make music. Now, thanks to video games and pitchcorrecting software, those without a tuneful voice or an instrument can play along. To some, that cheapens the work that goes into making music. For others, it’s a way to get a taste of performing.

“Everyone comes into the world with this innate desire to make music,” Alex Rigopulos, the chief executive of Harmonix Music Systems, told The Times’s Daniel Radosh.

Harmonix created the video games Guitar Hero and Rock Band, in which gamers play along with music using instrument-shaped controllers.

Mr. Rigopulos continued: “A game like Rock Band gets you maybe 50 percent of the way there with 3 percent of the effort.”

Many people don’t feel the allure of pretending to make music. Allan Kozinn, a Times writer who plays the guitar, is one of them. “The idea of picking up a plastic guitarshaped thing,” he wrote in a Times arts blog, “and pressing buttons while a bunch of colored dots scroll down against the backdrop of cartoon Beatles, just doesn’t do it for me.”

But plenty of gamers are happy to play along; Guitar Hero and Rock Band have earned more than $3 billion in sales, Mr. Radosh wrote. (The games have been slower to catch on in Europe; there are now international versions with different songs.) The Beatles are working on a Rock Band game to be released the same day as a remastered version of their entire catalog. Paul McCartney, one of the two surviving Beatles, told Mr. Radosh that the game made people feel like “they possess or own the song, that they’ve been in it.”

The other surviving Beatle, Ringo Starr, was more skeptical. “They’re playing a game, they’re not making music,” he told Mr. Radosh. “The music is already made.”

To aid singers there is the pitchcorrecting program Auto-Tune. When used heavily, however, it can make voices sound robotic.

The ubiquitous use of Auto-Tune by American pop and R&B singers has drawn parody and contempt. In a series of Web videos called “Auto-Tune the News,” Michael Gregory, a 24- year-old musician, uses the software on footage of anchors and pundits, Robert Mackey wrote on The Times’ blog The Lede. The rapper Jay-Z recently released a single called “D.O.A.(Death of Auto-Tune).”

The archaeologists in Germany who found the bone flute told John Noble Wilford, another Times reporter, that music “could have contributed to the maintenance of larger social networks, and thereby perhaps have helped facilitate the demographic and territorial expansion of modern humans.”

By contrast, there is no evidence that Neanderthals were musical, Mr. Wakin wrote in The Times.

“About 10,000 years later,” he noted, “they fell extinct.”


The art of making music has evolved over time. At left, a 35,000-year-old flute, the first instrument.