The most powerful tool we have for understanding the universe is right between our two ears. And those same ears provide a wealth of information beyond what our eyes can actually see. When we open up our ears and open up our minds, we open up ourselves to an entirely new way of understanding the universe.-- Robert Alexander, Using the Sun to Make Music
The Cunning Little Vixen, at once a charming children's tale and a profound allegory of modern life, may be Janáček's greatest achievement. It begins innocuously, as a folksy old forester -- as a child Janáček dreamed of being a forester -- captures a fox cub and brings her to his home. She runs amok, slaughters the chickens, and in banished to the woods. There she finds a handsome lover and woos him to music that parodies Wagnerian opera, notably Strauss in his kitschier moods. In Act III, the vixen is felled by a rifle shot, and the opera takes on an altogether different tone. In the final scene the forester steps out of his folk tale role and meditates on the passage of time. He seems to be musing about the very opera that he's in. "Is this fairy tale or reality? Reality or fairy tale?" The forester falls asleep, and when he wakes the animals of the woods surround hum. He sees fox cubs play and realizes that they are the vixen's children. He then catches a little frog in his hand, thinking he's seeing the same "clammy little monster" whom he met in the first scene of the opera.
Forester: Where have you come from?
-- from The Rest is Noise by Alex RossFrog: That wasn't me, that was grandpa! They told me all about you.In other words, the animals of the forest have been telling stories about the forester over the course of their brief lives, as if he were a hero from long ago. In the disjuncture between human and animal time we see him -- and ourselves -- across an immense space.
Dunes near Al-Askharah in Oman sometimes sing notes of almost every possible frequency from 90 to 150 hertz, or F-sharp to D.
A black hole can project sounds across the intergalactic cloud at 56 octaves below the B flat below middle C.
I've heard it said that...they were the only things to emerge from the final furnace the whales' carcasses were put through - the left-over bits that is. I've read - frankly, I've read as much as I can bear about whaling -- how the whalemen, slithered and groped in the whale-gore, seeking those ear drums...I find [the eardrums] beautiful and sad and complete; all that can be said about sea-waves and sound-waves, song and utterance, is rolled together in these forms.
...What did they hear...? They heard us coming, that's what.
Gibbons on helium sing like sopranosYes, there was a serious scientific purpose behind the experiment but it also looks like good material for an Ignobel
Musical performance is associated with powerful beings and is a means of communicating with them although it is not directly addressed to them...Communication may be said to occur not by singing to a powerful being but by singing it into being. Highly focused mental images are created in the minds of the performers by means of their performance...There is a consequent merging of the self with what is sung about; just as in myth powerful beings participate in human speech, so in ritual humans participate in itseke [powerful being] musicality and thereby temporarily achieve some of their transformative power.
-- from The Sound of a Damaged Habitat by Bernie KrauseWhat happens when [the animal] orchestra is disrupted by the anthrophony: chain saws, leaf blowers or highway traffic? If an indiscriminate sound like a loud motorcycle competes with the stridulation of an insect, the croak of a frog or the song of a bird, the affected animal may no longer be able to send its signal to mates or competitors. The voices of creatures in the choir may be drowned out. And mates and competitors will no longer be able to hear them. The integrity of the biophony is compromised......If you listen to a damaged soundscape — an expression of infirmity or extinction — the sense of desolation extends far beyond mere silence. The community has been altered, and organisms have been destroyed, lost their habitat or been left to re-establish their places in the spectrum. As a result, some voices are gone entirely, while others aggressively compete to establish a new place in the increasingly disjointed chorus.
When we were living closer to the natural world, we discovered links between the ways in which sounds were formed - what I call "biophonies". We then used this structure to learn to orchestrate and vocalise. That's how we got our music. It goes back to when humans first emerged from the forests and plains of Africa...-- Bernie Krause
There are a couple of groups, like the Jivaro in South America and the BiAka tribe of pygmies in the Central African Republic. Because they live as part of the natural world, they still do this collective music. They use the natural world as a karaoke orchestra. There's nothing primitive about it - it is far more advanced than anything we are doing.
evidence presented here suggests Walruses can be as creative in their use of sounds as Frank Zappa.(Zappa, it's been noted, lent his name to a number of remarkable beings.)
Through a hydrophone in the sea comes a series of long whistles that start high and descend, very gradually – ever so slowly – right down the scale. They sound like a cross between The Clangers and fireworks or artillery, but more gentle and sweet. It is bearded seals. This sound is suspended in a deep, vast, echoing underwater world, where crustaceans rustle and click in the far distance.The sounds made by 'our' seals -- (Arctic) bearded seals rather than (Antarctic) Weddell seals -- were more fluted and song-like.
Manakins spend 80% of their daylight hours dancing.-- Nicky Clayton
I cannot help thinking that if only I knew more about them, and how they maintain our synchrony, I would have a new way to explain music to myself.-- Lewis Thomas, writing at the time that the prokaryotic origin of mitochondria and chloroplasts was beginning to be understood (Organelles as organisms in The Lives of a Cell, 1974).
Vocal play (in the form of babbling) does not appear to be unique to humans. Elowson et al. note that this behaviour occurs in juvenile pygmy marmosets, that response from a caregiving adult is more likely when the juvenile is vocalising, and suggest that pygmy marmoset babbling has relevance to understanding the evolutionary processes of human vocal development.-- from The Evolution of Music: Theories, Definitions and the Nature of the Evidence by Ian Cross and Iain Morley (2002)
Even as I watch, however, I can see things changing. I realize the baby boy is beginning to come together. Already there are hints of small collaborative projects getting under way: his eyes and his hands working together, his face and his voice, his mouth and his tummy. A time goes by, some of these mini-projects will succeed: others will be abandoned. But inexorably over days and weeks and months he will become one coordinated, centrally conscious human being. And, as I anticipate this happening, I begin to understand how in fact he may be going to achieve this miracle of unification. It will not be, as I might have thought earlier, through the power of a supervisory Self who emerges from nowhere and takes control, but through the power inherent in all his sub-selves for, literally, their own self-organization.-- Nicholas Humphrey (2002)
Then stand with me again at the rail of the orchestra, watching those instrumental players tune up, The conductor has not come yet, and maybe he is not even going to come. But it hardly matters: for the truth is, it is of the nature of these players to play. See, one or two of them are already beginning to strike up, to experiment with half formed melodies, to hear how they sound for themselves, and -- remarkably -- to find and recreate their sound in the group sound that is beginning to arise around them. See how several little alliances are forming, the strings are coming into register, and the same is happening with the oboes and the clarinets. See, now, how they are joining together across different sections, how larger structures are emerging...
There is a world of difference between what a scientist can publish and what we encounter in the world.The discovery that a female White-handed Gibbon living in captivity bangs a door in time with her territorial song is described by Thomas Geissmann, a leading expert on gibbon conservation and behaviour, as 'tool use'.
The scientists believe that the parrots' apparent capacity for dance may be linked to another talent that they share with humans - the ability for vocal learning and vocal imitation.
They believe the part of the brain that evolved to allow us and a handful of other species, including dolphins, songbirds, elephants and some cetaceans, to learn and mimic different sounds may also be responsible for the ability to move in time to music.
"This is a capacity that everyone thought was uniquely human, but we've found evidence that some animals can keep a beat."-- Aniruddh Patel quoted in Birds show off their dance moves
"You see here a fundamental response to music seen in species that normally don't have a relationship to music in the world. [sic]
"They are clearly using a brain system that has a different day job, so to speak."
Konstantin Saradzhev [had] almost superhuman aural acuity: between two adjacent whole tones, he perceived not just one half tone but a half tone flanked on either side by a hundred and twenty-one flats and a hundred and twenty-one sharps.-- from The Bells by Elif Batuman.
When Saradzhev was seven years old, the sound a particularly powerful church bell caused him to lose consciousness, and he was captivated for life. Although a skilled pianist, he always referred to the piano as “that well-tempered nitwit”: a piano can produce only twelve tones per octave, whereas Saradzhev perceived one thousand seven hundred and one. This sensitivity perhaps explains Saradzhev’s intense delight in Russian bells, which are unparalleled in their microtonal complexity. Each bell sounds a unique cloud of untempered frequencies, producing intervals unplayable on any twelve-tone keyboard. By such acoustic fingerprints Saradzhev could distinguish all four thousand of Moscow’s church bells. He described his hearing as “true pitch” (by contrast with perfect pitch). The capacity for true pitch, he said, lay dormant in all humans, and would someday be awakened. But in the meantime he was, like a superhero, cruelly isolated by his own powers.
We can wonder what the mind and brain would be capable of if it would be directly interfaced to the world, bypassing the body.
