ANCIENT Chinese flute-makers rapidly developed complex and standardised instruments capable of playing composed melodies in tune with each other. By the beginning of the 6th millennium BC, the flutes could play very close to a modern musical scale.
Yun Kuen Lee of Harvard University led a team that analysed the tones produced by five flutes dating from between 9000 and about 8000 years ago. Unearthed from graves in Jiahu in central China in the 1980s, they were fabricated from the hollow wing bones of cranes. They are the oldest known playable musical instruments.
Lee’s team analysed the frequency of the note produced by each hole in…
