The study of prehistoric music is problematised by the simple fact that, by definition, no musical scores survive from pre-literate societies which had not yet developed writing or musical notation. While a modern singer can perform, for example, Adieu O Daisie of Delight by Andro Blackhall, more-or-less as the Renaissance royalty and nobility would have heard it in Linlithgow Palace, we simply have no way of telling which specific pieces of music a Bronze Age singer in the settlement at Kaimes Hill might (or might not) have sung.
However, for instrumental music the archaeological record does provide us with some organological[1] evidence of the musical instruments which prehistoric societies used. And from studying the construction of some instruments, we can even extrapolate a limited amount of information about the structure of ancient music from what we know of the types of sounds such archaeological artefacts are physically capable of producing. Moreover, we can also cautiously infer what kinds of social function music may have had in prehistoric cultures from the contexts in which archaeological finds are made, and from the level of crafting, forms of design and ornamentation which characterise them. For example, a simple and roughly-carved wooden whistle is more likely to have been for personal or domestic use than an ornately decorated bronze horn suggestive of ceremonial usage, perhaps commissioned from a trained professional designer by a wealthy patron such as a political, religious or other ceremonial leader.
With the exception of modern folk music, the serious study of Scottish music history has been a relatively under-researched field of musicology until the late C20th.[2] Equally, the study of prehistoric music as a whole has been neglected due to the traditional emphasis of musicology on written scores and thus, by default, the historical period. Moreover, within Scottish history in general, Lothian has often been treated as a marginal region until the medieval period, since it is only at this point that it begins to moves into centre of the modern nation's political development. And within the primary discipline which does offer sources for the study of prehistoric music - archaeology - Lothian is again a relatively neglected region of Scotland. As a result, there are currently hardly any significant prehistoric musical finds from Lothian itself.
All in all, none of this is encouraging for research into the prehistory of music in Lothian. However, by piecing together the little of what we do know of archaeological finds in Lothian, linking them to finds from similar cultures across Scotland and the rest of ancient Celtic Europe, and consulting various ancient Classical texts which give the first written commentaries on those cultures, we can at least begin to reconstruct a probable picture of music in ancient Lothian.
footnotes
[1] Organology is the branch of musicology which concerns itself with the study of the design and history of musical instruments and their technologies of production.
[2] cf. Steve Sweeney-Turner, "Reading Scottish Classical Music: A Historiographical Critique", in The Journal of Area Studies no.10, 1997, pp.104-120.