First Was the Music and Then the Word
Everything starts from a dot - Wassily Kandinsky.
Before the word, before the sentence, before the very notion, there was a sound/music. A cry, a rhythm, a beat on stone. Kandinsky’s idea of the dot as the primal seed of visual language resonates profoundly not only within the realm of painting but also in the broader scope of human expression. The dot, in essence, is the beginning of the gesture. And in sonic terms, that gesture becomes sound.
Before humanity developed complex language, it listened, sang, and created rhythm with bone and stone. Archaeological evidence confirms that rudimentary musical instruments such as flutes made from bird bone date back at least 40,000 years, predating most forms of written or spoken language as we know them. Even further back, in the hands of Homo erectus, we find engraved zigzag patterns on mollusk shells dated to nearly 500,000 years ago. While not music per se, these engravings represent a gesture a mark, and gestures are the siblings of sound. In this lineage, music precedes the word. The sonic gesture is more ancient than speech. When we look at Paleolithic cave art, painted and carved into rock walls, we find motifs of dance, ritual, hunting, and ceremony. Figures are depicted in motion. We see raised arms, leaping bodies, and swirling forms. Nowhere in these ancient murals is there a depiction of speech no mouths mid-sentence, no gestures of dialogue. We see rhythm and movement. We see the music.
In the 1930s, French musicologist André Schaeffner wrote that music is not merely an embellishment to human life but its foundation. He argued and demonstrated that instruments, especially those made of stone, were used in ancient Africa not only for ritual but also to create specific resonances and rhythms. Those resonances and rhythms that music were not random, passive sounds. On the contrary, they were created with precise intention and application.
This is followed, much later, by the theological assertion: “In the beginning was the Word.” This phrase, from the Gospel of John, has shaped Western civilization for two millennia. But what does “Word” truly mean here? In Greek, the term is Logos, which encompasses not just ‘word’ as speech, but also reason, logic, principle, and even cosmic order. However, when Logos is reduced to ‘word’ in contemporary interpretations of religion and technology, a vast oversimplification occurs. This oversimplification is particularly evident today in discussions about artificial intelligence. We are repeatedly told that everything begins with the word the command line, the algorithm, the query. Language is viewed as the source code of thought. But this is a fallacy born from theological heritage, not empirical fact.
In Homo sapiens, music is a pre-verbal form with the same purpose as words: to create communication. The cry and the drum are the roots from which language later branches. The biblical claim that “In the beginning was the Word” is a metaphysical narrative, not an anthropological one. The techno-utopian parroting of this phrase by AI theorists who claim that intelligence, consciousness, or even humanity begins with language is misleading. It is a retelling of a myth, not a reading of history. To understand human expression, one must begin with the body: the voice before the verb, the rhythm before the reason, and the dance before the word. Music is not a byproduct of human culture it is its origin. It is the breath before meaning, the pulse before structure.
First, there was music and it still echoes.
