Mouth music

This music tool was used in various forms of traditional music in the Anglo-Saxon, Gaelic, Turkish and Middle Eastern mouth music traditions. Such mouth music existed prior to the 1200s and the First Crusade into Palestine and the city of Jerusalem, possibly even before the year 900.

Its use may even be older, considering that contemporary music and classic European music developed as a derivative of its parents of Classic Poetry and the Myth-Drama plays from the Fertile Cresent Civilizations of Ancient Asia Minor and Northern Africa (Egypt, Rome, Persia, Mesopotamia Valley, Greece, Ethiopia, etc).

Interestingly, the modern descendants of the ancient !Kung tribes and clans of Southern Africa utilize similar traditional music techniques. That could mean the practice of musical onomatopoeia may be as old as human civilization.

The commonest types of mouth music in the Western world are found in jazz which knows it as scat singing, pop music where doo-wop and rap music employ it, and in the Gaelic tradition which has many terms for it, one of which is diddling[?]. The nonsense choruses of old English ballads[?], "Hey nonny nonny" and the like are another well known example.

Onomatopoeic music uses the mouth and vocal cords (that is, voice) as the primary musical instrument. A common music tool in European and American cultures uses the voice instrumental tool that is technically called a solfege. A solfege is a vocalized musical scale that is commonly known as Do-Re-Mi-Fa-Sol-La-Ti. A solfege may be sung, spoken or used in a combination. A variety of similar tools are found in skat (or scat) vocals and scat singing of jazz, Delta blues and also rock and roll and the ska of reggae (the last which is also called Two Tone).