Why is music – pleasurable to be sure, but hardly essential to life – so ubiquitous to every culture? “Archaeologists have found evidence of musical activity dating back at least 50,000 years. Even babies as well as some animals, such as birds, whales and monkeys, have a built-in sense of tone and rhythm, according to a set of six papers on the origin and function of music in the July edition of the journal Nature Neuroscience. ‘Every culture we’ve ever looked at has music of some sort. But why that is so is a puzzle’.”