Nicholas Bannan studied music at Clare College, Cambridge University, and received commissions from several choirs, the Guildhall String Ensemble and the Grieg Quartet. He taught at the University of Reading and the University of Western Australia. His research focuses on the evolutionary origins of the human singing voice. He edited with George Odam The Reflective Conservatoire (Ashgate, 2005), and edited Music, Language, and Human Evolution (OUP, 2012). As a teacher, he developed the evolutionarily informed pedagogical system he named ‘Harmony Signing’, which led to the publications Every Child a Composer (Peter Lang, 2019) and First Instruments (OUP, 2020).