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Birds Found Using Human Musical Scales For the First Time
sciencehabit writes The flutelike songs of the male hermit thrush are some of the most beautiful in the animal kingdom. Now, researchers have found that these melodies employ the same mathematical principles that underlie many Western and non-Western musical scales—the first time this has been seen in any animal outside humans. It's doubtful that the similarity is due to the physics of the birds' vocal tract, the team reports. Rather, it seems male hermit thrushes choose to sing notes from these harmonic series. It may be that such notes are easier for the males to remember, or provide a ready yardstick for their chief critics—female hermit thrushes. The study adds to other research indicating that human music is not solely governed by cultural practices, but is also at least partially determined by biology.
I guess you know everything.
He who lives in a glass house should not throw stones. Pot meet kettle. Etc.. This is just a sampling of your bashing other people over the past 7 days.
So......do you understand the greenhouse effect or not?
you're not understanding the scale of things involved
Do you lack reading comprehension?
do you actually understand the science involved?
My first instinct was to completely ignore you, but I figured it would only be fair to warn you before I blocked you out completely.
SystemD is trying to make a clean bootup system. Who doesn't like that?
Surely you understand that. Furthermore, another way you are also wrong
I'm kind of surprised you found it difficult, actually.
does it really bother you that much when someone implies you might be stupid
You got it wrong too.
Try taking your own advice:
Someone else doing something wrong isn't a justification to also do something wrong.
Pedagogy time. Vibrating bodies of any physical type will vibrate at an infinite ascending series of whole number multiples of the base frequency f (so, f, 2f, 3f, etc.) in decreasing -- but not linearly or regularly decreasing -- amplitude (the exact difference in the proportions of the various overtones, among other factors, is why different instruments sound different).
The musical scale used in most music in the Western tradition, however, does not use anything like a harmonic series. Rather, it (presently) uses an equal-tempered scale, such that each note is the same distance from the next. This is a convention adopted to make keyboard music in many different styles and keys more practical to play, but has almost no musical basis per se. To a sensitive ear, a lot of the intervals in an equal-tempered system (most notably the major third) are starkly out of tune from their harmonic manifestations.
Bach did not use, nor attempt to use, equal-tempered scales. This is an error of historical writing that was introduced by a poorly-informed musicologist into the 1890 edition of the Grove Dictionary of Music, and has persisted ever since. Bach not only could not have tuned his instruments to a truly equal temperament (the technology to do so was not available until the 1820s), almost everybody of his time agreed that more-equal temperaments sounded generally awful and unmusical. Bach used "Well Temperament," which is a distinct system of temperament (of which there are many variants; just which one he used is subject to debate), that kept most intervals in most keys acceptably approximate, while allowing each key to have a slightly different flavor/color.
I imagine the birds sing notes out of a harmonic series because the intervals are much easier to hear.