Music without Borders - biomusicology research

Science News, April 15, 2000 by Susan Milius

When birds trill and whales woo-oo, we call it singing. Are we serious?

Luis Baptista--presumably--is not making this up. Especially not in a symposium at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Still, the overflow crowd bursts out in giddy, slightly incredulous laughter.

Baptista, curator of ornithology and mammalogy at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, has played a tape including one of the most recognizable phrases in Western music: "Ba-ba-ba baaahm." Baptista has primed his audience on what to listen for, but still a high-pitched version of the opening of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony rings out unmistakably.

Not. The notes come from a white-breasted wood wren in Mexico, Baptista tells the audience.

The bird and Beethoven sound astonishingly similar and represent one of the many convergences Baptista has found between music and birdsongs. At the February meeting in Washington, D.C., he described birds conforming to musical scales, improvising sonatas, even rewriting Mozart.

Common word choice tells the story, he argues. Frogs croak, dogs bark, wolves howl--but, Baptista notes, birds "sing." Such a happy overlap with music holds great promise for introducing people to the marvels of species diversity, Baptista urges.

Other researchers wring more significance from the convergences. Pioneering animal communications researcher Peter Marler of the University of California, Davis holds that for insights into the origins of music, the vocal behavior of birds will prove to be as profitable to study as that of monkeys and apes.

This attention to animal music arises with growing interest in a broader area called biomusicology. Biologists are collaborating with musicologists to ask what music is and how it evolved. The mix has raised far more questions than it has answered, but it's attracting new fans to composers with feathers, fur, and some really loud noises.

Think twice, though, before saying something crass like "animal noises" around pianist Patricia Gray of the National Musical Arts program. "We say `musical sounds,'" Gray responds firmly.

Gray, who lives in Greensboro, N.C., has formed a coalition of about a dozen scientists and musicians under the auspices of the National Academy of Sciences. Through concerts and seminars, this BioMusic Project is "exploring the musical sounds of all species," she says.

So, does Gray accept a sparrow twitter as equivalent to her own keyboard artistry? "Why not?" she wants to know. "Why is it we go to other species with preconceptions of what our music means?"

Gray takes only the briefest pause before diving in to answer the blunt question, What is music?

When she was a college student, she recalls, composers were exploding conventions governing the sounds that could go into a musical piece. Compositions featured dissonances, fragments of speech, random noises, even John Cage's 4 minutes, 33 seconds of silence. The silent piece, 4'33", "was performed," Gray says, dodging the question of whether she, too, thinks silence is music. Out of this meltdown of musical tradition, Gray emerged with a spare definition. "Music is sound and time," she says. "Sound and time."

Gray's definition easily finds musicality in chirps, hoots, buzzes, and the myriad other acoustic phenomena of the living world. As a starting place for less liberal ears, however, she recommends avian music.

That works for music psychologist Diana Deutsch of the University of California, San Diego in La Jolla. She divides human sound communications into three loose groups: speech, music, and paralinguistic utterances such as laughs, screams, and groans. She likens the shrieks, yelps, and howls of many animals to that last category. However, "when we come to birdsong, with its elaborate hierarchical patterning, it seems that music provides a better analogy," Deutsch says.

Marler agrees that the majority of animal sounds will turn out to be "entirely emotional," although some communicate information about the outside world (SN: 9/12/98, p. 174). But he thinks that studies of whales and birds can contribute to the understanding of the origins of music.

Birds have earned the respect of some of the world's greatest musicians, Baptista says.

Mozart selected a starling as a pet and musical companion. The bird was an excellent choice, Baptista explains. Starlings pass down musical traditions, older males to younger males and older females to younger females. These birds mimic skillfully and abundantly--frogs, goats, and whistling shepherds.

Baptista cites a study of 80 wild starlings in France that turned up 105 imitations of other species. For starlings, music brings rewards. Females favor males that sing longer, more complex songs.

Mozart seems to have admired his avian companion's musical skills. One of his notebooks records a passage from the last movement of the Piano Concerto in G Major and the same passage as the starling revised it. The bird imitated it closely but changed the sharps to flats. "Das war schon"--That was beautiful!,--reads the comment in Mozart's hand.