Bird Vocalization - Bird Song and Music

Bird Song and Music

Some musicologists believe that birdsong has had a large influence on the development of music. Although the extent of this influence is impossible to gauge, it is sometimes easy to see some of the specific ways composers have integrated birdsong with music.

There seem to be three general ways musicians or composers can be affected by birdsong: they can be influenced or inspired (consciously or unconsciously) by birdsong, they can include intentional imitations of bird song in a composition, or they can incorporate recordings of birds into their works.

In his book Why Birds Sing, David Rothernberg claims that birds vocalize traditional scales used in human music, such as the pentatonic scale (e.g., Hermit Thrush) and diatonic scale (e.g., Wood Thrush), providing evidence that birdsong not only sounds like music, but is music in the human sense. This claim has been refuted by Sotorrio (Tone Spectra), who has shown that birds are not selecting scale tones from a miriad of tonal possibilities, but are filtering out and reinforcing the available set of overtones from the fundamental tones of their vocal cords. This requires "far less musical intelligence and deliberate appropriation", and in this regard, he suggests birdsong has something in common with Mongolian throat-singing and jaw-harp music. Sotorrio also claims that musicians like Rothernberg are deceived by "a perculiar form of Pareidolia" whereby complex tonal information is reduced to human scale concepts due to a "fixation on music as it is written rather than as it sounds". Rothernberg's claims were expored in the BBC documentary Why Birds Sing.