For the Record: An Incomplete History of Music (A Cosmic Shambles Documentary Series)

"Charlotte Ritchie presents a wildly ambitious and unapologetically brainy YouTube documentary that takes in Big Bang soundwaves, singing dolphins and an astonishing amount in between."

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2026/jun/25/for-the-record-an-incomplete-history-of-music-review-youtube-documentary

Obviously this is 100% my kind of thing, and I guess your kind of thing too? Though I don't want to assume.

Going to post the episodes here as I watch them.

Here's episode one, starts earlier than you might imagine (13800000000 BC)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=quj8JVU-usw

Gonna try to watch this tonight.

Sounds fun, thanks for starting the thread

Finally finished watching Episode 1 and am already halfway through episode 2, so thought I would check in!

Episode 1 was pretty good on the whole, I'm not as keen on Charlotte Ritchie as the guardian guy, she's fine but making it a bit too accessible, I want academic who are only friendly in a wry way please. And the song at the end was a terrible idea, we do not need more stripped down floaty covers of people's favourite songs, please.

Would sum up episode 1 as "what is sound" and episode 2 seems so far to be "what is music?"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZHCvjUpciI

Episode 2 was a mixed bag, the maths stuff I'm afraid just went over my head entirely, despite their best efforts to dumb it down. The stuff about the possible evolutionary purpose of music was decent though, and excited to see what episode 3 has in store. Song at the end was much better.

Part three seems to be starting on the actual history of music, two hours in.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yBD3cggIxao

(a month later lol) yes this was really interesting, a lot I didn't know about the first instruments, the first notated music and the ways music is passed on to new generations.

Episode 4 promises to cover the birth of recorded music, which is kind of my thing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LWTLhOJbFA

Already found out that Oud and Lute are cognates, nice.

And in the lute family over in Iran and Central Asia you’ve got the “tar” and a two string variant know as the “dutar” and then there was a three string version known as a the “sitar” which got carried to Western Europe via Arabic to become cittern, gittern, guitar, zither.