Musical scales in nature ?

Emp_Fab

So, I'm standing in the gents in work and I can hear what sounds like music, very faintly.  Then I realise it's coming from the water pipes.  There is a small flow of water in there that's causing some resonance somewhere - but the note is changing.  It sounds a bit like when you spin a flexible pipe around your head and get notes out of it.  There used to be a toy that did that years ago.

What struck me was the water pipes sounded like they were playing Greig's 'Morning' - the main theme of which is just G E D C D E, which apparently is a minor third, major second, major second then reversed.

So.....   are musical scales present in nature then, or is this a human construct ?  It's never occurred to me that we might have taken musical notes from nature (or at least the relative intervals, as I'm sure concert pitch has no meaning in nature).

.....and do birds sing in scales ?

Emp_Fab

Paging Mr @viz ;

viz

Yep, part of the harmonic series, which occurs everywhere in nature

Our complete musical system is based on natural frequencies (ok, sometimes modded and tweaked but the root of it all is in nature) - that applies to all musical systems, Indian, Japanese, Chinese, ‘Western’, African, etc etc. 

Whitecat

https://www.ted.com/talks/bobby_mcferrin_watch_me_play_the_audience/up-next

Tannin

Yes, of course. In all manner of ways and places. As for the birds question, yes, and very obviously so. Not always the 12-tone scale we westerners use.

Song is hugely important to many bird species, so much so that some grow a new brain every year. Well, a large new section of their brain, and it's specifically there to generate music, and keep track of the music other birds in nearby territories make. Weight is another critical factor for birds (this is why they have no teeth and hollow bones and feathers, and very simple digestive systems, it's all about staying light enough to fly). For this reason, when the breeding season is over, the magical musical brain atrophies and disappears. It is heavy and takes a lot of nutrient to run. When it's not needed they get rid of it. So it's not that a Grey Shrike-thrush doesn't sing much in the autumn, it can't sing much right now because it has lost its musical brain. It will grow a new one in mid-winter, ready for the spring breeding season. This is why the songs change from year to year: the bird has to learn to sing again every time. You can hear them doing it if you pay close attention.

Listen to your local Common Blackbird. You will hear it starting out a bit scratchy and simple in early spring, rapidly recovering full tone and complexity. You will notice that its song is similar to the one it had last year, but not the same. If it is a completely different song, then most likely that bird died and a newcomer has moved in to the territory. Common Blackbird song is intermediate in complexity, more advanced than many species but much less rich and varied than that of the real specialists. (You will have to travel to hear one of those: the UK doesn't have any first-class songsters.)

A third example: the Pallid Cuckoo is sometimes known as "the semitone bird". Its simple, repetitive song is a 9-note ascending chromatic scale in E. (Well, possibly in E. They stopped calling a month or two ago and have flown north for the winter now. I just whistled it from memory - it's one of the easiest of all bird calls to imitate - and found the first note on a guitar. E. Possibly. But whatever the starting note is, the scale is definitely accurate - and if you recorded it carefully enough and measured precisely, I'd bet money that it would turn out to be using just intonation.

There are many other examples.

Emp_Fab

Wow.  That's fascinating @Tannin. ; Thankyou for such an informative reply.

Bellycaster

Every Fart has a Pitch

  

EricTheWeary

viz said:

Yep, part of the harmonic series, which occurs everywhere in nature

Our complete musical system is based on natural frequencies (ok, sometimes modded and tweaked but the root of it all is in nature) - that applies to all musical systems, Indian, Japanese, Chinese, ‘Western’, African, etc etc. 

IIRC all music systems have the octave. Even though the concept can be an odd thing to explain to someone who knows no music theory pretty much all cultures have recognised lower and higher versions of the same note and based their systems on that. Many will have the same fifth as well as that’s the second strongest relationship. 

And there are a lot of compositions based on bird songs such as by Handel and Beethoven so to some extent bird song sounds like human music because we’ve heard it represented as such. 

Anyway, this is a Hermit Thrush which is an American songbird often described as using a pentatonic scale, so seemed to be one for here...


https://youtu.be/o0mATRdzZSc

viz

EricTheWeary said:

Anyway, this is a Hermit Thrush which is an American songbird often described as using a pentatonic scale, so seemed to be one for here...

https://youtu.be/o0mATRdzZSc

I think it was just trying to do Smoke on the Water. 

Neill

Tannin said:

Yes, of course. In all manner of ways and places. As for the birds question, yes, and very obviously so. Not always the 12-tone scale we westerners use.

Song is hugely important to many bird species, so much so that some grow a new brain every year. Well, a large new section of their brain, and it's specifically there to generate music, and keep track of the music other birds in nearby territories make. Weight is another critical factor for birds (this is why they have no teeth and hollow bones and feathers, and very simple digestive systems, it's all about staying light enough to fly). For this reason, when the breeding season is over, the magical musical brain atrophies and disappears. It is heavy and takes a lot of nutrient to run. When it's not needed they get rid of it. So it's not that a Grey Shrike-thrush doesn't sing much in the autumn, it can't sing much right now because it has lost its musical brain. It will grow a new one in mid-winter, ready for the spring breeding season. This is why the songs change from year to year: the bird has to learn to sing again every time. You can hear them doing it if you pay close attention.

Listen to your local Common Blackbird. You will hear it starting out a bit scratchy and simple in early spring, rapidly recovering full tone and complexity. You will notice that its song is similar to the one it had last year, but not the same. If it is a completely different song, then most likely that bird died and a newcomer has moved in to the territory. Common Blackbird song is intermediate in complexity, more advanced than many species but much less rich and varied than that of the real specialists. (You will have to travel to hear one of those: the UK doesn't have any first-class songsters.)

A third example: the Pallid Cuckoo is sometimes known as "the semitone bird". Its simple, repetitive song is a 9-note ascending chromatic scale in E. (Well, possibly in E. They stopped calling a month or two ago and have flown north for the winter now. I just whistled it from memory - it's one of the easiest of all bird calls to imitate - and found the first note on a guitar. E. Possibly. But whatever the starting note is, the scale is definitely accurate - and if you recorded it carefully enough and measured precisely, I'd bet money that it would turn out to be using just intonation.

There are many other examples.

That's absolutely fascinating @Tannin - but where I live the birds "sing" all year round - I'm aware there is a difference between the "songs" birds use to attract a mate or define their territory, and the calls they issue, say, as a warning against predators. So I guess what I'm hearing in the winter months is not "singing" at all?  It certainly sounds like singing to me, but you clearly know a lot more about this than I do.  Is this part of the brain that birds use to sound the alarm different to the musical part that dies every year?

Tannin

Yes Neil, different part of the brain. And you guess right. But lets go back a few steps. 

We will start by distinguishing between "calls" and "songs". A proper ornithologist could be more precise than I can, but essentially you have a variety of generally quite simple sounds used by almost all birds to communicate obvious things: for example "Feed me mum!" or "Bugger off before I  thump you!" or "I'm over here honey, are you there?" or "Lookout! A snake!". Most of these calls are different from one species to another, but some are universal. Every species understands alarm calls, and all alarm calls are fairly similar. When you think about it, that is sensible: sparrows and wrens and robins all benefit from being told if there is a hawk nearby. Indeed, you can introduce the sparrow to Australia, where the native small birds are completely unrelated to English wrens and robins, and they all understand one another perfectly well, at least so far as alarm calls go. (Many mammals are similar, and any mammal of a relevant size understands birds' alarm calls. Mice fear hawks just as much as sparrows do.)

Song is a completely different thing. Song is a mutated territorial/mating call on steroids. It is much more complex, varies from one individual to another, is more learned than innate, and most of all; it is highly competitive. By singing long and loud and in lots of different musically interesting ways, a songbird of course says "this is my patch, you lot keep out", but also demonstrates his strength, intelligence, and health - not least through his ability to sing for hours where a lesser specimen might have to be busy foraging. I say "he" because quite often it is the male who does most or all of the singing while the female gets on with the business of raising a family, but with some songbird species both sexes sing - sometimes the same songs, sometimes different ones.

Song turns out to be a remarkably efficient way of communicating over quite long distances through forest, and an efficient, non-harmful way of negotiating mating and territorial rights. Yep: they could just fight, but the loser can't just fly away uninjured afterwards, and even the winner of a physical fight can often have (e.g.) damaged plumage, and birds rely on immaculately maintained plumage for day-to-day survival the same way a 737 relies on having its engines oiled and serviced. With a song contest, no-one gets hurt. Evolutionarily, it is a significant advantage. We know that because the group of birds which sing (as opposed to just call) has been remarkably successful over the last 30-odd million years and has spread all over the world. That group, called "passerines" is just one of the 26 different orders of birds  but almost half of all bird species worldwide now are passerines. That is a phenomenal success story. (An "order" is a large biological grouping: in mammals the order Carnivora, for example, includes all the cats, dogs, badgers, bears, and various others: they are related.) 

As a general rule, song (as opposed to mere calling) starts before the breeding season (usually spring, so they start establishing a territory sometime around the end of winter) and tails off as the chicks mature. But some species seem to sing all year round. We don't know that all species do the brain-shrink thing. Probably most don't and it is limited to some of the most accomplished singers (who have the biggest musical brains and thus the most to gain from it). The research which demonstrated it was done in Europe (Germany, from memory) and I can't remember which species they used. So we are only assuming that a similar process occurs with (say) the Australian Grey Shrike-thrush, or the Indian Black Robin. But it's a reasonable assumption to use  pending further research, and will very likely prove correct. 

(Yes, I've oversimplified a bit above. Not all passerines ("songbirds") sing, and there are unrelated birds with very advanced vocal skills - some of the parrots, for example. But these are details we can ignore for now.)

So yes, unless you live somewhere really weird (like Antarctica or Mars), birdsong will be seasonal. Oh, or live somewhere where there aren't any seasons: in the tropics they still have seasons after a fashion but they aren't so noticeable or significant.

Sorry for the long post!

ICBM

Tannin said:

Sorry for the long post!

Don't apologise - I've learned more on a completely unexpected subject from these last two posts of yours than I can ever remember doing about anything else.