One theory about the development of our brains is that reliance on hearing played a large part in it, at a time when we were tree-dwellers vulnerable and fearful at night since sound, needing to be measured over time, requires more processing power than visual information. Neither of these ambitious and complementary books goes back quite so far, though they start from the same recent discovery about the distant past: that prehistoric wall paintings coincide with the spots of maximum resonance within caves. Artistic expression in its earliest visual form was a response to richness experienced through the ears.

Each book is the published accompaniment to a series in another medium, Noise being a commission from Radio 4, while The Story of Music has just finished its run on BBC2. Howard Goodall has form not just as a presenter (with the excellent Big Bangs) but as a composer. If anyone could bring off a survey of music that, while it obviously can't hope to include everything, doesn't exclude any musical style or event in advance, then it has to be him. Even the most rushed whistlestop tour of the subject would have to make time for a halt outside the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in May 1913 for the première of The Rite of Spring, but Goodall manages to find space to discuss another Stravinsky score, Les Noces from 1923, whose soundworld he regards as even more influential.