On Musicality and Bird Song: Ornitic serinette

In the Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale, “The Nightingale”, the sweet warbling of the songbird enchants an emperor and wards off death (Anderson 20). Music has deep and complex origins in environmental sounds- likely providing the evolutionary catalyst for pre-linguistic forms of social communication. Human speech and music have evolved concurrently with, not independent from, animal songs; a beautiful, interwoven secret that reveals ancient complexities about the evolution of social communication and our musical relationship with the natural world.

Composer and music historian John Hawkins posits that people learned melodies and diatonic music principles- or scales with seven notes of a tone per octave- from birds, going as far to claim that bird songs contain in them “the rudiments of harmony” (Head 13). In similar fashion, legendary French composer Olivier Messiaen dedicated his life to carefully transcribing bird songs into usable musical notation, and using these songs as inspiration for his compositions, notably Le Merle noir (The Blackbird) and the Catalogue d'oiseaux ("Catalogue of birds'') series, including works inspired by the calls of the Eurasian curlew, the Greater short-toed lark, and the Tawny owl (Fallon 116). To Messiaen, birds are the world’s first, and most spiritually divine, musicians (Peltz 2-6). This sentiment is shared by others of his time, with naturalist and author Schuyler Matthews stating

“…I believe the birds with their music are the revelation of a greater world, one with just such a boundless horizon as that which we view from the mountain’s summit marveling that it is indeed the same narrow world we live in” (Matthews 25).

However, there exists a complex and deeply unromantic debate on both the musicality of birdsong as well as the definition of music itself- involving complicated dimensions of biology and aesthetics. While there isn’t a definitive definition of music, it is largely considered by modern music theorists as a distinctly human trait; an aesthetic audio product bred from our innate and unique capacity for creative and emotional processing- extending beyond pure necessity for survival. Despite music’s roots in natural sounds (Stewart 7), many modern music theorists declare philosophers and composers’ fascination with bird song mere projection, with little to no merit on the validity of bird song as music. As birdsong is hard-wired and biologically imperative for reproductive success- seemingly lacking the individuality, creativity, and intent inherent to human music- it is considered too deterministic to be considered “music” as defined as an expression of feeling and emotional output. In the technical sense, bird song tends to contain inconsistencies in pitch and rhythm, employs notes outside the highest reaches of a piano, and is difficult to replicate on human instruments (Hold 115).

In true testament to ecological perseverance, the musical prowess of avian songs prevails. Hermit thrushes, small, robin-sized birds native to North America, sing songs that are notorious in musical and ornithological circles for their alleged musicality. Walt Whitman describes the warbling of a hermit thrush as “death’s outlet song of life”: haunting, melancholic, echoing as an ethereal whisper instead of a symphony. With modern statistical analysis tools, hermit thrushes have been legitimized as genuine musicians and producers of harmonic song. In 2014, a hybrid research team of avian cognitive biologists and music theorists proved that select hermit thrush songs mathematically follow the same rules that underlie human musical scales, favoring frequency ratios from the harmonic series (Doolittle et al. 4). This new research challenges the anthropocentric notion of music as a human trait and suggests an overlap between avian and human song cultures, suggesting that birdsong may have an aesthetic function outside of biologically imperative reproductive behavior.

As a scientist with a spattering of ornithological experiences- primarily researching the reproductive behavioral and migratory ecology patterns of birds of prey and Chinese songbirds- birds and bird songs have deeply influenced my inspirations as an artist and an enjoyer of music. To honor my experiences in field ornithology, I want to bridge the gap between human and animal music and offer an alternative definition of music that includes both culturally and biologically determined sound. My installation, “Ornithic serinette”, takes song notation from a specific harmonic hermit thrush song, as denoted by Doolittle et al., and transforms the notes into a tangible musical instrument. In utilizing digital tools to create a musical symbiosis between human and avian actors, I am continuing Messiaen’s musical legacy and promoting the philosophy of birds as the world’s first musicians. In creating the instrument in the form of a nest with eggs, I want to both honor my origins as a reproductive avian ecologist and create a grounding experience that connects the human users to both their sense of play and to the natural environment- creating a kinship in the hopes of shedding light on ancient secret of concurrent human-animal music evolution and promoting music as a means of social communication. This project seeks to delegitimize the anthropocentric notion of music as a definitively human trait and promote animal sound and song as a form of aesthetic music, rather than just a product of reproductive necessity.

All relevant musical data for Ornithic serinette was sourced from "Overtone-based pitch selection in hermit thrush song: Unexpected convergence with scale construction in human music" from Emily Doolittle, et al. These researchers used the "overtone hypothesis" to test the harmoniousness of hermit thrush songs. The overtone series refers to how single pitches produce multiple additional harmonic pitches that are all divisible by a base or fundamental frequency. The resulting pitches from the overtone series serves as the foundation for much of modern harmony theory and is at the root of most Western music.

The frequency of the 1st overtone is calculated by doubling the fundamental frequency, the 2nd overtone is calculated by adding 1/2 of the 1st overtone to the first overtone, the 3rd overtone is calculated adding 1/3 of the 2nd overtone to the 2nd overtone, and so on. The below table shows the pitch and frequencies of overtones 1-5 with a fundamental frequency of 110hz.

The hermit thrush song recording used to create "Ornithic serinette" can be listened to by clicking the play icon down below. This particular hermit thrush song was determined by Doolittle, et al. to follow the mathematical rules of the overtone series; ie. predictably generating integer frequencies divisible by a foundational frequency. Figure 1 shows the frequency comparison of the selected hermit thrush song (A) as compared to 3, 4, 5, and 6 of the overtone series (B). Figure 2 shows a spectrogram of the recorded song. Spectrograms visualize bird songs by plotting the frequency of sound over time (kHz/s), acting as a sort of auditorial "signature" unique to each species of bird. Individual notes from the song were extracted using Melodyne, a music analysis software, and assigned to keys using Max/MSP/Jitter.

Acknowledgements