Musical Analysis o f Birdsong

Introduction

From Yeats`s golden dove to the nightingale in Berkeley Square, human society has viewed birdsong as a symbol of beauty. But is that response conditioned by societal expectations, or does birdsong really adhere to musical rules? By recording and transcribing the note sequences of common birdsong, we able to determine that their songs do adhere to the traditional euphonic progression of thirds, fourths and fifths found in most human music. After this was completed, we played the melodies thus transcribed digitally, using music writing software to determine whether people would respond positively to the birdsongs that followed the golden rule and negatively to control human made songs that did not follow the patterns of thirds, fourths and fifths.

Hypothesis

We predicted that birdsong did adhere to the common "golden rule" structure of human music, and we expected that human response to it is sufficiently conditioned so that listeners would respond more positively to the birdsong than to human composed melodies. As many members of our group are musicians, we found the possibility that human musical norms could be found in nature as an extremely intriguing concept for study.

Through the process we hoped to identify the musical properties of birdsong which have enticed humans to mimic and compose their own melodies. We hoped to classify birdsong historically in the large realm of human music by studying how they fit into the patterns of sounds we call music. In categorically transcribing birdsong we should be able to find parallels and common themes between the music of the natural world and the music that humans order on pages in notes and progressions.

Relevance/Background Information

The human production of music appeared early in the history of man, and while mimicking animal sounds, perhaps primitive music appeared before any spoken language. Notes and scales established over thousands of years were first documented and transcribed in a written representation during the renaissance. Because there are no records before this time, the relationship between the current definition of human music and the sound patterns created by birds is indeterminable. The parallels between the musical patterns pleasing to the human ear, which have been scripted and concreted in human song and the patterns of birdsong, is the basis of our study. Intrigued by the congruent relationships, we represent these similarities and spark some deeper conjectures as to the origins of music, and how the correlation between human song and bird song evolved.



While birdsong is a widely addressed subject in ornithology, the aim of the studies are by and large very different from our group's approach, tending to focus more on the neurobiological and bioacoustical aspects of birdsong rather than its musical nature. Some studies, notably Hartshorne's Born to Sing and Schuyler and Pelican's The Music of Wild Birds, go so far as to transcribe certain passages of birdsong in standard musical notation, but do not evaluate its structure. We address this shortcoming by creating a lexicon of transcribed and analyzed birdsong and gain insight into the effects of social pressure on people`s aesthetic judgments (Hartshorne 1973).



The statement "birdsong is pretty" would hardly be contested by the average listener, but that statement is bound by a system of structures of which that listener is at least subconsciously aware. For instance, the territorial cries of a turkey or the harsh call of a crow, both of which meet the biological definition of birdsong, are rarely described as beautiful. Conversely, the songs of a lark or a nightingale are often cited as paradigms of musical euphony. One possible explanation for this dichotomy is that the song of, for instance, a robin, differs from that of a jay on a musical level (Pelican 2004). Transcription and reproduction of common birdsong, with special attention given to acquiring both harmonious and discordant song, provides, in our study, an empirical explanation for this longstanding cultural assumption.



The concept of musical norms, while useful on a large scale, becomes increasingly inaccurate as the study focuses on individual songs and listeners. Musical tastes differ widely from one person to another, and what may be perceived as musically pleasing to one individual may be aurally intolerable to another. The seemingly universal acknowledgement of the calls of songbirds as euphonious calls into question the strictly aural nature of that judgment. Even if the call of a given songbird adheres perfectly to the golden musical ratio of Pythagoras, a listener who enjoys more dissonant music would not necessarily interpret the song as pleasing. By transcribing and performing common birdsong in the context of human music, we determine that people define birdsong as appealing because they find it so, or because that has how it has always been presented to them. This information provides an interesting view on the nature of human aesthetic perception, and the degree to which it is colored by societal expectations (Thielcke 1976).



We unite our more musically based experimental paradigm with the wealth of studies addressing birdsong on a scientific level in order to create a comprehensive theory about the biological and musicological nature of birdsong. By transcribing and analyzing birdsong musically, the study evaluates a possible connection to human musical norms as well as to avian evolutionary pressures. In addition, the study sheds light on the nature of human aesthetic thought and its concomitant societal aspects.

Materials:

In order to discover the connection between birdsong and popular music, we needed materials related to sound recording and music transposition. Many of the recordings of birdsong that we used came from outside resources, such as web sites or recordings from the library. Once obtaining and catagorizing the birdsongs by family, we transposed them on paper on a musical staff using a guitar to match the melodies. From the paper, the songs were transcribed into the computer with the help of musical/keyboard software.

The program we used transpose the bird recordings into actual song format is called "Melody Assistant." This program allowed us to create sheet music of birdsongs, by ear and by reproducing transcribed birdsongs. Once we had created the sheet music of the song, "Melody Assistant" allowed us to hear the songs we had written, played by the instrument of our choice. This function was helpful in comparing our birdsongs to popular recorded music and in entering them into our survey.

The second program we used was called "Garageband", which helped us mix birdsongs and polpular music into the same file so that we could portray the similarities. With this program we were able to create tracks in mp3 format in which we could play a clip of a song and fade into a digital recording of a bird.

The list of materials needed for our project is relatively short. It consists of:

- Recordings of birdsongs

- "Melody Assistant" and "Garageband" computer programs

A Specific Research Design

Our study centers on the musical analysis of birdsongs in comparison to human patterns in music. Using recordings of bird from Internet and library sources, we transcribed the songs into written music, by means of a guitar and a computer. Next, we analyzed the musical components of each transcribed song for melody, harmony, rhythm, pitch, duration, and timbre. We compared the bird songs with the melodic structures most euphonic to the human ear, for example, the "golden ratio" and musical harmonies composed in thirds, fourths, and fifths.



To address the appeal of birdsong on humans, we made a collection of songs that have similar patterns to certain recorded birdsongs from our findings. We collected these pieces of music from various genres so that we can evaluate a broad, international recognition and appreciation for birdsong, whether consciously or not, our study shows patterns found between the music of humans and the music of birds. We included these pieces in a survey as well as our transcribed birdsongs and the original recordings to test human reaction. Including control pieces that do not follow the patterns or composition of birdsong, we analyzed the reactions to the transcribed birdsong with the reactions to the controls. Our hypothesis was that the majority of respondents will find bird songs moderately to highly appealing and the controls less appealing on a scale from one to five:



1: Highly unappealing

2: Moderately unappealing

3: Neutral

4: Moderately appealing

5: Highly appealing



In order to decrease bias in our study, our survey was composed of a random sample of an equal number of individuals from both genders. We sampled from the entire campus, rather than exclusively studying on Western. We played the same songs for each individual in the exact same order, with the same description of our study beforehand. We conducted the study in dining halls, in class rooms and on the street. Afterwards, we statistically analyzed our data in order to determine the actual appeal of bird songs to the human ear.

Timeline

Week 1: Gather digital sound files of birdsong

Week 2: Transcribe sounds into sheet music

Week 3: Find songs that correlate with patterns in birdsong

Week 4: Survey population

Week 5: Analyze results to check our hypothesis



Beethoven and Birdsong. Judge for yourself.





Beethovens Fifth:

Wood wren:

Link to further pages and find the results: