Recovering musician Seth Kaufman grew up overseas, in Kenya and India, the son of a foreign correspondent. He ran a popular online music store where he sold so many copies of Kenny G records he should be tried at The Hague. He has written a number of books, including The King of Pain ("One of 2012's most enjoyable novels" - The New York Times), contributed humor pieces to the New Yorker website and freelanced for many other publications.

AN ACOUSTIC INTRO

The Anne and Bernard Spitzer Hall of Human Origins in the American Museum of Natural History in New York City gives visitors an overview of millions of years of human history. It's a slick and informative exhibit about our ancestors and evolution. Among the highlights on display, you can see Lucy, the finest 2-to-4 million year-old hominid specimen in existence.

The exhibit has a small display about music, which of course is very much part of the human experience, and unique to the species. Birds aren't "singing" because they are happy. They make sounds that may sound like music at times, but those sounds are not music; no, those sounds are the result of an ingrained, inherited reflex.

A section in the music display is titled HOW AND WHY DID MUSIC ORIGINATE? It speculates on a number of possible social functions of music, noting it could have been "used for courtship, territorial claims, and uniting social groups". And it ends with this: "Whatever its original uses, music is now present in every human culture, implying that a biological capacity for music evolved early in our specie's history."

I love this sign because, in a world-class museum that is dedicated to studying, cataloging, displaying and explaining so much of the natural world, what this sign really says is: Nobody knows when or why music first started, but we think it must be goddamn important. So music, it turns out, is a bigger black hole than a black hole itself. I'm not kidding: Go to New York's Rose Center for Earth and Space, right next door to the Museum of Natural History, and you will see that we know far more about the origins and the structure of the universe than we do about the origins of music. There's even a super-cool four-minute movie exhibit in a concave theater about the Big Bang. It's a bit more elaborate than three or four speculative paragraphs about the origins of music at Spitzer Hall.

Recovering musician Seth Kaufman grew up overseas, in Kenya and India, the son of a foreign correspondent. He ran a popular online music store where he sold so many copies of Kenny G records he should be tried at The Hague. He has written a number of books, including The King of Pain ("One of 2012's most enjoyable novels" - The New York Times), contributed humor pieces to the New Yorker website and freelanced for many other publications.

AN ACOUSTIC INTRO

The Anne and Bernard Spitzer Hall of Human Origins in the American Museum of Natural History in New York City gives visitors an overview of millions of years of human history. It's a slick and informative exhibit about our ancestors and evolution. Among the highlights on display, you can see Lucy, the finest 2-to-4 million year-old hominid specimen in existence.

The exhibit has a small display about music, which of course is very much part of the human experience, and unique to the species. Birds aren't "singing" because they are happy. They make sounds that may sound like music at times, but those sounds are not music; no, those sounds are the result of an ingrained, inherited reflex.

A section in the music display is titled HOW AND WHY DID MUSIC ORIGINATE? It speculates on a number of possible social functions of music, noting it could have been "used for courtship, territorial claims, and uniting social groups". And it ends with this: "Whatever its original uses, music is now present in every human culture, implying that a biological capacity for music evolved early in our specie's history."

I love this sign because, in a world-class museum that is dedicated to studying, cataloging, displaying and explaining so much of the natural world, what this sign really says is: Nobody knows when or why music first started, but we think it must be goddamn important. So music, it turns out, is a bigger black hole than a black hole itself. I'm not kidding: Go to New York's Rose Center for Earth and Space, right next door to the Museum of Natural History, and you will see that we know far more about the origins and the structure of the universe than we do about the origins of music. There's even a super-cool four-minute movie exhibit in a concave theater about the Big Bang. It's a bit more elaborate than three or four speculative paragraphs about the origins of music at Spitzer Hall.