The Sound of Skin and Sinew

Available for over a year

How did the domestication of animals change our music-making? Archaeologist Dr Brenna Hassett takes us on a several-million-year-long journey to ask how we came to be the species that makes music. It is the story of noise. Purposeful, beautiful noise. And the unbelievable talent we have for adapting the material world we live in to make musical instruments. This final episode brings us into a much more recent world. One where we are not only masters of our own human voices, and makers of instruments from wood, reed, bone, stone and clay, but at the point in time (about twelve thousand years ago) when we started to become entwined with the animals we once hunted. This Neolithic Revolution, also known as the First Agricultural Revolution, brought about many innovations. Including new and exciting ways to make melodies, from skin and sinew, hide and horn. This series of essays is part of Key Changes: Radio 3's Essential History of Classical Music Written and read by Dr Brenna Hassett from the University of Lancashire Produced and directed by Becky Ripley