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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.
Turns out, it might have been a couple of bluejays getting horny!!!
The only thing missing was the sound of the thermin...
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Bird Reporter: This just in! Humans now claiming ownership of our musical scales.
The extent hearing is determined by physics is largely ignored. Musical theory is, in its most literal form, about matching waveforms. They harmonize because the waveforms are in harmony, literally. That such a physical point exists outside of human cognition allows it to be an emergent point for evolution, easier to learn how to detect through the white noise than patterns that fail to resonate coherently in the listener's environment.
Frankly, duh.
a bird singing some Messiaen the other day. The resemblance was uncanny.
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.
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).
False. Your description is only true of very even (theoretical) one-dimensional vibrating bodies. Thin strings and thin columns of air (think some brass instruments) come closest to this, but those are generally not naturally occurring.
Even other human instruments display a much greater variety of potential harmonics -- if you introduce a conical bore instead of a cylindrical one into a wind instrument, for example, some harmonics will be emphasized over others, and the "infinite ascending series" of continuously decreasing amplitude becomes less and less true.
But if you look at other vibrating bodies that have more than one dimension -- which is actually of course true of ANY real thing in the real world -- the set of overtones produced will be quite irregular and not generally relatable to one single fundamental frequency.
Even among human societies, ethnomusicological studies have shown that cultures which tend to use a lot of instruments which are NOT one dimensional often have scales that diverge greatly from the "normal" construction using "standard" intervals. (For example, traditional Javanese music, which is often based around gongs and other instruments with irregular 3-D shapes.)
So, there's nothing "natural" about the harmonic series except when you construct an instrument to specifications which are somewhat rare in nature. (That doesn't mean they do not occur in nature, but among the variety of sounds produced in the world, they are only a small part...) Which means, of course, that acceptable "musical" scale and sounds are shaped by our cultural expectations.
I imagine the birds sing notes out of a harmonic series because the intervals are much easier to hear.
For birds or for humans? Having read a lot of the previous literature on animal and music studies, it's not at all clear that birds hear anything like humans or react to elements in a harmonic series in anything like the way humans do. I'm not saying it's impossible, but people have been looking at this stuff for MANY years (including quite a few previous bird studies that have found NO evidence of this), and there is a reason this study is claiming to be the "first" to show anything like this.
So, unless all the previous literature is flawed, or unless this particular species somehow "hears more like humans" than other birds, I'm not sure what general conclusions can be taken away from this one study.