What Is the History of Music?
The history of music spans from prehistoric bone flutes to digital streaming, tracing how humans have organized sound across every culture and era.
What has been corrected on this page?
Every accepted correction to this page is recorded with the exact change, so readers can see how the page improved over time.
-
2 corrections applied: No notated music survives from c. 3400 BCE; the Hurrian Hymn (c. 1400 BCE), named later in the article, is the oldest notated song. | The 'Well-Tempered' title denotes well temperament, not equal temperament (which divides the octave into twelve equal semitones).
Before[FAQ JSON-LD field] (1) "Sumerian hymns inscribed on clay tablets from around 3400 BCE at Nippur represent the oldest written music in the world." (2) "his Well-Tempered Clavier demonstrated the possibilities of equal temperament tuning, which divided the octave into twelve equal semitones and made all keys equally usable."
After[FAQ JSON-LD field] (1) "Sumerian hymns inscribed on clay tablets represent some of the oldest written references to music in the world, though the texts themselves were not yet musically notated." (2) "his Well-Tempered Clavier demonstrated the possibilities of well temperament, an unequal but circulating tuning in which all keys became usable while each retained a distinct character."
Why: Body text and inline FAQ section were already correctly fixed from the prior session, but the invisible FAQ JSON-LD field (read by search engines/AI crawlers) still had BOTH stale fabrications: the 3400 BCE/Nippur claim and the equal-temperament mislabeling of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier. Decoded the faq field (base64->json->base64->json), corrected both answers, re-encoded using the exact reverse sequence. Verified post-PUT that the FAQ field still resolves to a valid 7-item array with both fixes present and no unverified text remaining.
View the full record →
Who checked this page?
1 contributor has checked "What Is the History of Music?" on When Notes Fly. Each name below links to that person's public CitePep profile, where every contribution they have made is listed with the exact change they proposed.