The First Songs

Nature gave us the first songs -- the patterns and melodies that we replicate in instruments, and our own voices. We take a visit to the exhibit, "Wild Music," to look at our deep connection to nature and music.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
From how Stuff Works dot com. This is the stuff
of Life. Welcome to the Stuff of Life. I'm your host,
Julie Douglas. Imagine yourself as a newly hatched cicada, living
deep in the soil and the vast crisscrossing tree roots.

(00:23):
You drain the network of tree sap until you become
plumper and plumper, and each year that passes, there's a
mounting sense that one day the temperature will be just
so and you will know it's time to dig your
way to the surface. For seventeen years, you toil under
the earth for one reason, and one reason only, to
come to the surface and mate to find the one

(00:45):
who will respond to your finely tuned notes, the one
who will make her way through a thicket of a
thousand other songs to you and only you. In this episode,

(01:06):
we turned to nature, to the songs that are all
around us. We take a trip to Bernbank Museum in Atlanta,
Georgia for the exhibit Wild Music, and we eavesdrop on
humans in animals in communication. The High Elephant Orchestra to
me is a perfect example of non music being built
as music, and we talked to John P. S Waddle

(01:32):
about his study on the Eastern bluebirds, birdsong increasingly smothered
by noise pollution. I try to see the world as
much as I can through the senses of the animals
that I study, and that's largely birds. So I think about, well,
how are the birds being affected by this at this time?
But first human bird song? That's rus song from the

(02:04):
movie The Hunger Games, a four note tune, at times
signaling goodbye to loved ones and at others showing support
for the revolution. But this is a fictional whistle. On
the coast of Turkey, in the small mountain village of Kaskoy,
people use bird like whistles to communicate across steep hills.
The following whistle conversation is addressed to a man named

(02:26):
yak Up, and it's about how his tea is ready
and his sister will be home soon. He replies that
he's cutting hay and will be there in a moment. Amazingly,
these whistles, sprinkled among similar sounding bird calls, allow for

(02:47):
nuanced information to be transmitted. It's pure bio mimicry. Humans
impersonating nature, and while we move further and further away
from nature as a model to emulate. We can find
its auditory influence everywhere, even in horror movies. Daniel Bloomstein,
an expert in animal distress calls, made this connection in

(03:09):
his study, finding that nonlinear sounds like the blown out
vocalizations of an animal scream elicit a biologically ingreamed response
to them from us, and that horror movies often weave
animal screams into their soundtracks. That's the distress call of

(03:30):
the baby marmoset a large ground squirrel. It shares a
similarity with an iconic moment in a certain movie. These
are manic pieces of noise, effective tools for manipulating our
fear at a primal level. Raising the hackles of our
alarm systems that were deeply rooted symbolically and otherwise with

(03:57):
the sounds of nature. Is also evident in the exhibit
Wild Music at firm Bank Museum. When you enter the
Wild Music exhibit, you're met with a siren call from
the ocean. That's the mink at whale. We used to

(04:18):
think of the ocean as containing vast silence, but underwater
microphones called hydrophones have revealed a world of sound, snapping shrimp, farting, fish,
underwater earthquakes, and of course other worldly whale songs. But

(04:41):
that we identify these tones as songs in the first
place is a thorny issue, as the exhibit explores through
three different perspectives. The first is from Steve Nowiki, the
dean of Natural Sciences at Duke University and a longtime
student of bird song. I think the question what is
music is something that we all have to answer for ourselves,

(05:02):
because the word music is referring to an aesthetic ideal.
Some of us might define that quite narrowly. If we
were interested only in, say, classical music, then we'd throw
out Stravinsky and and certainly John Cage modern rap in
a whole bunch of other popular music. Others of us

(05:22):
would define music is anything that triggers our own personal
aesthetic response. I listen to bird songs a lot, and
I consider that a kind of natural music, or a
wild music. I'm willing to put the word wild or
natural in front of that, because I understand that musicians
would maybe take exception to broadening it that much. But

(05:45):
when I'm out in a marsh at dawn and the
sun is just rising, the world around me is filled
with a symphony of sounds, and that marsh Nowiki is
picking out a melody, and in that melody emotion, it

(06:09):
all comes together for me in a very esthetically overwhelming package,
and I consider that a kind of natural music. It
gives me a kind of emotional response that is in
the same vein as the response I might get from
listening to Beethoven's Ode for Joy. Nowiki also points out

(06:40):
that while most people would consider bird song as musical,
not all would say that it is actually music. Something
musicologist Elizabeth Tolbert of Johns Hopkins University isolates in the
Thai Elephant Orchestra on the elephants, if I had been
trained to play, I guess or at least make sounds

(07:00):
with Thai traditional instruments. And when you hear it not
knowing that it's elephants making the music, it sounds one way.
And when you hear it knowing that it is elephants
making this music, it sounds another way. And I think
that when you hear it within the expectation of it
being music, in a way, it is music at that

(07:22):
point because a human has recorded it and presented it
as music. But if you think of it in terms
of what the elephants are trying to do. It's not
music in that sense, And I think this shows you
how impossible it is to hear a sound. Just as
pure sound, there's always some sort of interpretation going on
in the background. Tuna McIntyre, a Central Yupick Eskimo artist,

(07:48):
echoes this idea that it comes down to us as
the interpreters. Music is a search. In my estimation, what
we're trying to say is it's a search for emotion.
That's why from ancient times we call it yokun. The
reason for looking or searching a duck is the act

(08:11):
of singing. It essentially means you dawn on your search
your music. You put it on, almost like a piece
of clothing. So do animals truly make music? For Tolbert,
it's not likely these sounds can be interpreted as if

(08:31):
they were made by people or made by some kind
of supernatural beings that have human like intentions and thoughts.
But we shouldn't attribute that kind of thought process to
a bird that is making these sounds. But for McIntyre,
animal song and our interpretation of it are one and
the same. Well, take the raven. The raven is one

(08:55):
of our most important birds in our ancient and even
today's mythology, and we sing his songs, songs that are
born of him. We vocalize and we sing some other
humans and understand what he's singing about. Chicken dah, a

(09:20):
chicken dah, A chicken kicking chick. That's one of those
little diddies that we sing of the raven when he's
jumping about and you know, just being sure of himself
and picking little leaves or grass from the ground. When
animals sing, they aspire through our abilities to interpret music, song,

(09:46):
or dance. In essence, they sing through us. We become
the interpreters. We become the vehicle of these aspirations for
the animal kingdom. It's almost like we're doing this in
concert together, and after all, we all exist in the
universe together. It's impossible to know if animals have the

(10:19):
same kind of search for emotional meaning and song that
we do, but it is possible to demonstrate that they
have a very visceral response to these melodies. You can
show that a female birds reproductive system will change when
she hears a male birds song. It actually stimulates her
reproductive system, It changes her hormonal profile and will lead

(10:42):
her to become more likely to build a nest and
lay eggs and so forth. You can show that um,
a male song sparrow, for example, that here's another song,
Sparrow's song, well within a few minutes have a higher
level of testosterone in its bloodstream and will become correspondingly
more agressive. So those are different kinds of responses than

(11:10):
the responses that I would feel, say, to a Beethoven symphony,
I mean, I hope my testosterone level doesn't rise in
response to, say, arousing the scared. So these discussions about
music and animals and the way we view the matter
because behind these songs are warnings, invitations, the buzzing of life.

(11:32):
But this buzzing, this background to our city parks, are
streets in our backyards is changing. We're seeing extinctions accelerate
at a very rapid pace, and geologists telling us that
the rate of extinction currently is perhaps even outside the
rate of any mass extinction event the planets ever experienced.
What people are going to experience in terms of their

(11:53):
own sort of connections with nature are going to be
fundamentally different than when I was a That's John Peace Waddle,
a professor at the College of William and Mary, a
biologist who studies bird communication. I was one of those
kids who, from a very young age actually knew what
they wanted to do. Even as a six seven eight

(12:14):
year old, I was fascinated by animals. On his way
to elementary school, Swallowwood passed by the house of Sir
David Attenborough. He was one of my heroes just from
a very young age, and I grew up watching his
programs all the time, and I just became fascinated by
what animals do. To persuade females that come close and

(12:34):
admire his poos, he sings the most complex song he
can manage, and he does that by copying the songs
of all the other birds he has around him, such
as the Kukamara. Birds aren't just sensitive to the noises
around them, but to the changing conditions as well, so
much so that we have the term canary in a
coal mine to describe their ability to suss out danger

(12:57):
before humans do. Birds are certainly sent an alls for
a lot of ecological change because birds are very dynamic
within a lot of ecosystems. They are both prey and
predators within a lot of ecosystems, and so if something
happens within that environment, birds are often a fairly sensitive
indicator of something going wrong, and we've seen shifts in

(13:20):
bird populations substantially. Just in the last couple of decades.
There have been studies about birds altering the way they
sing a relative to their environment. For instance, birds in
the cities sing differently than birds in the country because
of background noise. But Swallow and his colleagues wanted to
know how this was affecting the bird's behaviors, and they

(13:43):
did this by studying eastern bluebirds and exposing them to
different noise levels. Not only did they find that the
birds could definitely adjust their songs, but in some instances,
the birds had to shout to be heard. Birds can
change the way they saying very quickly and very dynamically,
so really just as humans do. If you've found yourself

(14:06):
in a noisy situation, you start shouting, but as you shout,
the pitch of your voice also goes up, and that's
exactly what bluebirds do as well. In the study, the
implications of sound pollution are starkly evident in the noisest
situations among the birds that we studied. The birds who
were trying to breed in the noises conditions have far

(14:26):
fewer babies than the birds that were breeding in the
quieter conditions, even though they were changing their songs, so
that comes at a cost. They're producing fewer babies, and
so there would be a fitness deficit for living in
those noisiest conditions. Okay, to bring it down human terms,
imagine trying to settle down and have a family all

(14:48):
in one night. Had allowed bar where you're trying to
shout over the music to make a connection. Well, we
humans can leave the bar and seek the refuge of
our apartments. Bird habitats are the bar. There's no escaping
the thumping noise. And it's worth noting that in the study,
Swaddle in his colleagues weren't even exposing the birds to

(15:09):
the worst of noise pollution. The noises that we recorded
here in the context of what the bluebirds had to
sing over, were nowhere near as loud as construction or
a chainsaw. This is largely road traffic, and you know
a fair distance from the roads to as well. So
this is more akin to say the sound of a

(15:31):
washing machine while you're in the room next door, or
something like that. It's not a really loud song. Perhaps
it's like the sound that's kind of noise that you
might experience if someone has the TV on and you're
trying to have a conversation. Okay, so the bird population decreases,
what's the harm Because the birds are connected to what
eats them and what they eat, and they also disperse seeds,

(15:55):
it also changes lots of other parts of the ecosystem
as well. To the point of the even changes the
plants that are in the area, because the birds interact
with the plants, either by spreading their seeds or by
eating things that eat the plants, and so on. So
the effects of noise on conservation biology are really quite
profound and quite unexpected to most people who just think

(16:17):
it might be a nuisance, But it's really detrimentally affecting
lots of different types of organisms. Swaddle study, which is
just a sliver of an example of all the ways
human activity is altering nature, demonstrate something called the cascade effect.
The reduction of one species can have dreadful effects that
spiral out and affect other animals and even the landscape itself.

(16:41):
These animals and biodiversity is important to us as a society,
and we're actually losing something substantial by losing biodiversity, And
it's another part of this whole argument about why people
should be more concerned about nature, more connected to nature.

(17:03):
Nature gave us the first songs, the patterns and melodies
that we replicate in instruments and our own voices. The
first songs that transcended the limits of a spoken word language,
giving us the ability to communicate powerful emotions immediately, The
first songs that gave people a sense of unity, and
the first songs we used as a basis for our

(17:24):
own ritual and social behaviors, including courtship. The question is
whether these first songs will persist or whether they'll continue
to recede into the background of our own noise. Thank

(17:46):
you to Firm Bank Museum, which is currently exhibiting Wild Music.
Wild Music is a production of the Association of Science
Technology Centers, the Science Museum of Minnesota, and the University
of North Carolina at Greensboro School of Music, with major
funding from the National Science Foundation and additional support from
the Harmon International and ec Foundation of America. Thank you

(18:08):
to John Swaddle for talking to us about his work
with Eastern bluebirds. The Stuff of Life is written and
co produced by me Julie Douglas. Original music and sound
design is by co producer Noel Brown. Editorial oversight is
provided by Head of production Jerry Rowland. In the next episode,
which wraps up season one of the Stuff of Life,

(18:29):
we look at how life is just a game, gets
down to defining who you are, right and like gamification
gives you metrics to help you to define who you are,
and we like to think that based on merit, that's
how we accelerate and level up. If you like what
we do here, visit us on Facebook and Twitter. In

(18:49):
the meantime, email us your season two episodes. Suggestions at
The Stuff of Life at how staff works dot com.