We are living in an era of omnipresent music, which is caused by the fact that the media enable us to use music any time and anywhere. Whether we like it or not, we encounter music everywhere, which leads to fatigue caused by sound excess resulting from the fact that music is treated functionally, mainly by the so-called muzaks, playing pieces selected in order to achieve some specific benefits. Consequently, music often seems to be noise, as, according to psychologists, all acoustic stimuli that disturb people who have to bear them are, in fact, noise. Today, music functions in our homes as a background to everyday life that does not require listening, as a result of which people become used to turning a deaf ear to it and, consequently, become indifferent to it and lose any musical sensitivity. The omnipresence of music is also enhanced by earphones that transmit it wherever we want, which has its good and bad sides. The advantage is that the listener does not impose his or her music on others; the disadvantage — according to otolaryngologists, the listener is at risk of gradually becoming deaf. The abuse of music is denounced mainly by musicians, who want to have some sensible, binding regulations in this respect. Unfortunately, they have had little success until now, so music keeps making a noise.
The origins of music have attracted the interest of representatives of various areas of knowledge and intellectual movements; however, the theory of music being born at a very early stage of human evolution is yet to be sufficiently substantiated. As things stand now, various hypotheses are proposed to be assessed for their scientific usefulness. Those hypotheses testify to the popularity of a belief that music was first made of sounds related to primitive people’s needs, i.e. functional sounds. The authors of the hypotheses also find these needs in the ways food was procured, in work-related processes, in communication over a distance, participation in rites, games, etc., or simply in human nature. Some of those needs are referred to and analysed here. Another question is why and when those functional sound structures could be transformed into the art of music, or when they started to provoke people to be handled that way. In the author’s opinion, this happened when somebody became interested in a sound structure if only for the fact that they liked it, or in other words, because of an aesthetic need or simply for fun. Accordingly, the author believes that the birth of music can be pinpointed neither to any place on the map nor any time in history, as it was induced by many individual instances of a new non-functional approach to sounds produced or only heard by people.
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