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Okay, but did birds invent music? · Okay, But... Birds

0:00
Coming up on this episode of OK But Burns.
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So there's no reason to consider function and aesthetics as mutually exclusive.
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.
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Cornell, 2015.
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I'm a postdoc at the Lab of Ornithology, which means by day, I'm thinking very seriously about hybrid zones and population genomics.
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And by night, on this particular night, I'm standing shoulder to shoulder in a packed venue while a sea of people around me scream the bridge to call me maybe at full volume.
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Carly Rae Jepsen is on stage.
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I am technically a grown adult with a PhD.
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I am also technically having the time of my life.
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The hooks are working.
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The crowd is into it.
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I'm worried the bass is going to give me an arrhythmia.
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And somewhere underneath the embarrassment of admitting this is my first real concert, I'm thinking, whatever music is, it's happening in this room right now.
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I think about that night frequently because it, along with the many other concerts I've been to since, sits underneath a question I find genuinely interesting.
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We treat music like a uniquely human invention.
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Symphonies, jazz clubs, three-chord pop songs, the entire Carly Rae Jepsen discography, ours.
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A thing we made up.
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And then animals, including birds, exist over here in a separate category, doing something that resembles music but is, the textbook tells us, just function.
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Some bird songs just hit differently.
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Winter wrens in a damp cedar forest going off for 10 seconds at a tempo no human could keep up with.
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Hermit thrushes at dusk building intervals that sound to a western ear almost composed.
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Wood thrushes singing what genuinely sounds like a duet with themselves.
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And look, I'm putting my cards on the table.
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White-throated sparrows are my deep-seated love, and I will defend that clean-whistled phrase as the most quietly perfect piece of songwriting in North America.
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Which brings us to the topic of today's episode.
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Okay, but did birds invent music?
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To explore this topic, we'll talk with Dr. Hollis Taylor, who has spent the last 20-plus years recording, transcribing, and thinking hard about the songs of the Pied Butcher Bird.
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For listeners who haven't seen one, the Pied Butcher Bird is a medium-sized black-and-white songbird from Australia with a sharp hooked beak and a name it earned by impaling lizards on thorns like little hors d'oeuvres.
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It also sings, and it sings well.
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Hollis is a violinist, a composer, an ornithologist, and the author of Music from Another Species, which is, as far as I can tell, the most generous and most rigorous book ever written about taking a bird seriously as a musician.
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After the break, Hollis walks us through how she ended up spending more than two decades recording, transcribing, and thinking deeply about the songs of one bird in the Australian outback.
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Stay tuned.
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Well, welcome back, everyone.
3:21
I'm so excited to have Hollis Taylor with us today.
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Thanks for joining us, Hollis.
3:25
Thank you, Scott.
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So you're a violinist, a composer, an ornithologist, and I think, you know, most scientists studying birdsong are trying to decode what it means.
3:33
And I would love to start off with how you came to asking this other completely different question, which is whether birdsong is actually music.
3:41
Well, I had an epiphany about 25 years ago on a sheep ranch in Western Australia.
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It was my first trip to Australia.
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And I was walking around looking for a kangaroo naively because they're nocturnal.
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And suddenly I was surrounded by a jazz flute trio.
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Three pied butcher birds and three different trees were singing in just this rich liquid crystal voice singing.
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And I had no idea birds sang in trios, and I was astounded.
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And of course, composers always need new ideas, but somehow that wasn't the source of my astonishment.
4:19
I just felt like these birds were up to something really exceptional, and I didn't want to improve on their song.
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What I really wanted to do was just find out more about it.
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So two years later...
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I began my PhD research into their vocalizations.
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And for me, there was never any question that it was music.
4:40
For me, from go, the musician in me recognized the musician in them, and I was like,
4:47
And is birdsong music?
4:49
I didn't really even think that was the best question on offer, but I was somehow forced to answer it or defend it just because there were so many misconceptions both about birdsong and also about human music.
5:04
For instance, all that birdsong is merely functional, whereas human music is for pure enjoyment.
5:12
I think it's interesting that you came into this where there's this standard scientific view that birdsong is just utilitarian evolved for communication, territory, defense, mating displays, but that that probably leaves out a lot.
5:24
How have you navigated all of that?
5:25
Well, first of all, we can assume that pied-butcherbird vocalizations evolved for those very reasons.
5:32
I don't try to—I read science, and I love what scientists have discovered.
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But while the functions, say, of territorial defense and finding a mate do a lot of the heavy lifting, we know that life's necessities are—
5:49
Largely marked by pleasure.
5:51
Maybe not paying taxes is not so pleasurable.
5:54
But certainly, you know, but so there's no reason to consider function and aesthetics as mutually exclusive.
6:01
So I think of songbirds as enlisting aesthetic qualities to do their work.
6:09
work and run their lives.
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And it's for a practical purpose.
6:14
We humans do also affirm our territory, our group, our identity, our age through our musical choices.
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And there are now many books that musicologists have written on that topic.
6:28
So that's really not contested anymore in musicological circles.
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So
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Here's the problem.
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Music is often conceptualized as a Beethoven symphony.
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And you're just not going to have that with birds because you're not going to have a hundred birds fly into a small territory that can only support, you know, a much smaller number.
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Music is not a formula, which I think is often...
6:56
overlooked.
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You find the logical way, and when you find it, avoid it.
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That was the advice of Duke Ellington, and I think it's such good advice.
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So Pied Butcherbird songs, like all good music, exceed any kind of rigid set of rules or instructions.
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And so, as you've suggested, Scott, in my work, I'm constantly bumping up against things that I think exceed the necessity
7:26
And I think the more you watch animals, like even outside of music, I was asked once, like if birds fly for fun, my response was, I don't know, but like I would if I could fly.
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And you know, you see corvids sliding down, snow covered roofs on their backs and things like that.
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That's not functional.
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Someone could say like, oh, they're trying to get rid of parasites, but it's probably not that.
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It's just some other thing that they're doing because they're complex creatures and they have all these capabilities.
7:52
So with respect to pied butcher birds,
7:54
And they can sing in these trios, but they can be more than trios, right?
7:58
I mean, there are group songs and there are solo songs.
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And the group songs are, or we can call them ensemble songs.
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Some people call them antiphons or antiphonal singing.
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Two or more are singing together.
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It can be very, very tight.
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So kind of together that you would only think one bird were singing if you weren't looking at them.
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So you really have to not just record it, but be looking at them to know, oh, that was a duet.
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Or the duets can be very loose, like say a Dixieland jazz kind of, you know, one gives a comment and another one comes back on that.
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So there's a range of things they do in groups.
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And I filmed from two to eight birds singing.
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Sometimes they double.
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They sing in unison, you know, but you'll see their heads kind of go up and down.
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So that helps you parse who's singing what as well.
9:08
Yeah.
9:08
And then the solo songs, they can do a little practicing during the day, but the main solo songs are nocturnal.
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These can be long.
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Yeah.
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Once they start, they'll sing until dawn.
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And then they also mimic.
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And if I could, I would just love to talk about their mimicry because they're nocturnal songs.
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They're singing for a second or two, followed by a few seconds of silence.
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And then all of a sudden they start this mimicry, which...
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is often described in a kind of, when it's described in a scientific way, it's like, you know, imitation by birds of sounds outside their normal characteristic vocalizations.
10:02
But that's such a kind of impoverished way of thinking about mimicry, because when you see a bird that normally sings...
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slow and kind of low, all of a sudden go super high like a tiny little bird singing nonstop.
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And then he's doing a horse whinny.
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Then he's doing every second it changes or two.
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Horse, dog, cat, other birds, cell phone ringtone, fire alarm, everything.
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So it's just really, it's mind-blowing.
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And why?
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The scientists don't really have even a good theory, and there doesn't maybe even seem to be one obvious function of why birds are mimicking.
10:54
And pied butcher birds have a good-sized repertoire of their own.
10:58
So, of course, I love to play around with why do they do this, you know, census, census.
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Audio diary.
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My favorite is insider joke.
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Who knows?
11:10
Then as far as the important part of your question, which is the communication system, we know that calls...
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communicate.
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There's likely an innate component.
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It might be some learning involved, but some just they're born with.
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And calls can be mobbing, nesting, feeding, flocking, greeting, whatever.
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And so those have meaning.
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That's not challenged.
11:39
Then do songs communicate?
11:42
I think that
11:44
in a general sense, likely.
11:46
But when I hear birdsong, I connect it, first of all, not to meaning or language or decoding or theory.
11:56
I just connect it to other birdsong and to human music.
12:00
So music...
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is another way of communicating and not something that's waiting to be decoded into words.
12:09
Yeah, definitely.
12:10
No, I like, that's a really interesting way to think about it.
12:12
And with respect to songs, so do these pied butcher birds across the annual cycle, like do they have song all the time or do they go through periods where they're singing less?
12:22
Like here in North America, obviously like the chickadees I work on, their song is really tied to hormones that are circulating.
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So when it's the non-breeding season, you're not hearing Phoebe, which is very simple.
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compared to the Pied Butcher Birds.
12:35
But what is it for the butcher birds?
12:36
Do they also have the seasonal variation in when they're singing versus calling?
12:41
Yes, they do.
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Although they tend to sing the group songs a lot in the autumn.
12:48
Oh, interesting.
12:49
That's during the day, diurnal.
12:52
Yeah.
12:53
And you don't hear nocturnal singing at all.
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Nocturnal singing is a springtime approximate phenomenon.
13:06
You've worked on these birds for a long time.
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What are some of your standout experiences, one or two stories that really stand out?
13:12
It would be great to hear them.
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Sure.
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As I alluded to, the nocturnal songs are long.
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And once they start singing, they'll sing till dawn.
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And they may be several hours long, say they start at 3 a.m. or something.
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And I once met a camper who suggested that the bird in their campground was starting to
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somewhere around 11 or 1130 and that I should come and check it out.
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So, you know, sometimes with local knowledge, it can be either gold or it can be nothing, you know?
13:46
Yeah.
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And so this was gold.
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I went, I got permission from the campground, even though I was staying in another campground and I arrived at 11.
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I put up my mics.
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The birds started singing at 1115.
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Mm-hmm.
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at night and he sang until 6.15 the following morning.
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That's seven hours.
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He took one 20-minute break.
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Wow.
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My partner suggested, well, why don't you play that song on the violin?
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And then I thought, oh my gosh, how would I ever play for seven hours?
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You know, okay, you get a 20-minute break, but then you realize just what an expense of energy.
14:23
Yeah.
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And when I analyzed it, Scott, I was hard-pressed to find any kind of particular order to the phrases.
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So he wasn't on automatic.
14:33
Yeah.
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And I recorded another bird over a two-month period.
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I have all-weather mics.
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He was quite regular in the trees that he sang in, so I could put up my all-weather mics and not even have to be there.
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And I recorded him every night for two months.
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And there again, he didn't start with the same bits.
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He found a new way in each night.
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And the next year, his phrases were mostly transformed or completely transformed.
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One of the things that they do is they piece together things.
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You could call it combinatorial, or it's like snap together beads.
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Yeah.
15:06
And, you know, you got the orange bead and the blue bead.
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And so around here, I'm not a singer, but so, boom, boom.
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They sing a short, long articulation, usually on F sharp to F. But then a bird might add a note before that.
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Boom, boom.
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Or they might add a note in the middle.
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Or they might put something at the end.
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So they're constantly reworking old material.
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Yeah.
15:39
I love, yeah.
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And the more you listen to them, I guess the more you can see how they do that.
15:43
And especially having this year-to-year recordings of the same individual and really seeing that it's not...
15:49
Like he doesn't always start this way and that he'll mix it up this way.
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So Pied Butcher Birds have been your focus for a very long time.
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Like are there other birds in other parts of the world?
15:58
You would have heard that also and thought, oh, this is music the way you did with Pied Butcher Birds.
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You know, we have several other bird species here in Australia that sing at night that we would consider diurnal birds, the daytime birds.
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But they do in the spring sing at night, our Australian magpies.
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They usually have only two phrases, which they just hammer away at.
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They don't change it.
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They don't do anything.
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Yeah.
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And of course, I resent them because they step on the more gifted Pied Butcher bird.
16:32
Right.
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And then there's the willy wagtail bird that everyone loves here in Australia.
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And they sing really super high.
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It's very silvery and doesn't really get in the way that much.
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Whereas the Pied Butcher bird sings like a flute or a trumpet or...
16:53
Yeah, it's interesting.
16:54
I was thinking about like, what birds do I hear?
16:56
Sometimes during the breeding season in North America, I mean, American robins will sometimes sing at night.
17:02
But again, it's a different quality of song than what you're describing with these butcher birds that it's much more...
17:08
Yeah, kind of all over.
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I'm not a musician, so I don't know how to describe it properly.
17:12
But if you had the spectrogram, it would be wide.
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Anyways.
17:17
Yes.
17:17
I guess in that sense, so your new book is about birdsong transcription and the process of translating what a bird sings into something that a human musician can then read and play.
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And what does that process, that translation process, reveal a typical recording misses?
17:34
I love that question, and no one's ever asked it to me quite like that.
17:38
So Music from Another Species is my new book, and it contains about 250 birdsong transcriptions, some of them many pages in length.
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And still, they're just excerpts of hours-long songs.
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I always have to simplify them.
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for humans to play.
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I do a detailed transcription to begin with, but if I'm going to ask a human musician to sing it or play it, I definitely have to simplify it.
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And the sonograms are wonderful voice prints.
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They give us...
18:15
Rhythm, they give us pitch, they give us timbre also with the tone color.
18:20
Yeah, yeah.
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So those are great, and they're definitely part of my process.
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And as I'm working through, I always put every phrase in a sonogram, and ultimately, I rely on my human ear.
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I rely on what I've heard, but I do measurements correctly.
18:36
I've had biologists tell me that they often don't listen to a birdsong recording.
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They just rely on the sonogram, the trained eye.
18:45
And here's where biologists and musicologists have very different questions.
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So biologists will be dealing with statistical difference in large data sets.
19:00
I'm interested in one-offs.
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If we think about, say, Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, if a bird sang, and I actually have a recording of a bird doing this, ba-da-da-bum, okay, fine.
19:12
But if he sang, ba-da-da-bum, like to a musician, it's like completely different.
19:19
Yeah.
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But statistically, to a biologist, it might be not different.
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So, yeah,
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It's a matter of what your question is, I guess, what you're going to use notation for.
19:34
But for me, notation is definitely my go-to gizmo.
19:39
Yeah.
19:39
Yeah, it's interesting to think about what you lose if you're just trying, like, we've done some studies of birds where we're interested in genetic variation, but then also trying to quantify this song variation between populations in the context of, like, is this a different species?
19:55
I mean, we specifically aren't typically listening to the songs when we're doing that.
19:59
We're looking at them and saying, okay, the amplitude is different or putting different marks on that and then asking, is there a statistical difference?
20:09
That's obviously going to miss stuff, especially like it can be statistically not that different, but still sound quite different to humans.
20:16
Oh, man.
20:17
Such a different way to think about it than this biologist over here who really loves birds and the way they sound.
20:24
Yeah.
20:24
So you play these songs back.
20:26
You're a violinist.
20:26
And I'm wondering, like, what happens when you try to match a butcher bird, like, note for note?
20:31
How does the violin...
20:33
falls short or any other instrument that you've tried.
20:35
And where does the bird do something like that these human-generated instruments really just can't replicate?
20:42
Well, the hardest thing to replicate would be what we will call a portamento or a glissando, a gliss, you know, a swoop up or down, especially if it's very steep.
20:54
Now, on my violin, of course, I can, you know, I can do a slide.
20:57
On a piano, no.
20:59
You know, you have a chromatic, you know, rather than mainly it's a matter of speed beyond that.
21:08
But also timbres, tone colors that they can do that are really amazing, you know, kind of real hard edged rattles or softer rattles.
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And sometimes I just have to do something.
21:24
different, even if it's not on the violin, even if it's not exactly what they did just to mark a change in tone color.
21:32
Yeah.
21:33
The shrinks that birds are using to make these sounds is this really cool muscular organ that they have control over both sides of, which is so different than the way a human larynx works.
21:42
And just how that structure and then the muscular control of it relates to any kind of instrument we've ever designed.
21:49
So it makes sense to me that you'd have to
21:51
sometimes improvise and just say, okay, we're going to change using this sound.
21:54
But yeah, it's kind of a stand in.
21:57
So human music is built around scales and intervals and tonal centers that feel right to like human ears, right?
22:04
So when you're analyzing Butcher Bird songs, do you find the same intervals showing up or are they like working with an entirely different system?
22:13
Great question.
22:14
Wow.
22:15
Okay.
22:16
So first of all,
22:19
We know that there's more than one scale or several scales that we use in certain music.
22:29
Places all over the world use different modes and scales.
22:34
Are they singing certain intervals or are they singing in the key of D or something like that?
22:40
Sometimes I feel like there's a tonal center.
22:45
Sometimes...
22:47
They preference certain intervals, but usually not.
22:52
And one of the reasons that I think not is because birds have absolute pitch or perfect pitch.
23:01
In other words, they know that, you know, it's a sea or whatever.
23:05
You know, I have that too.
23:06
So I can relate a little bit to what they're doing.
23:11
And so I don't need a scale, like a scale kind of...
23:16
It keeps you knowing where home is, and I don't need that in order to find my way musically.
23:23
So it could be that they don't need that either, and that's why they tend not to approach their singing so much like that.
23:30
Interesting.
23:31
That made me think of, so one of my favorite birds is the bullfinch, just because they're very cute.
23:37
Like a male bullfinch is a very cute bird.
23:39
But then I heard this story about how there used to be loggers who would like adopt a bullfinch and whistle.
23:46
classical music to the bullfinch during the song learning and crystallization period.
23:51
And even if the lager didn't have perfect pitch, the bullfinch would learn it and then correct it and sing it better, which is just such an interesting...
24:00
I would have... Yeah, that just sounds like the most magical thing ever to be in the woods and hear a bullfinch singing like perfect Mozart or something like that.
24:07
Yeah.
24:08
It's very cool.
24:09
What do you think accepting birdsong as music changes?
24:13
Yeah.
24:14
I really like thinking about it in the way that you've described and this idea that it can't just, I mean, certainly there's utility to these things, but there's also more than that.
24:23
And what do you think it changes from a scientific or conservation perspective or just how we should think about nature?
24:30
Well, I don't claim that birds invented music.
24:34
Perhaps like eyesight, music has been invented across species, you know, on multiple and separate evolutionary paths.
24:43
We know that similarities can arise from a common selection pressure without a common definition.
24:49
ancestor or close common ancestor.
24:52
So it's really been a challenge to even define music.
24:56
As we talked earlier about, you know, what is music across human music, across time and geographies and cultures.
25:03
And musicologists don't even have a working definition of their subject.
25:08
They've kind of thrown up their hands.
25:10
They went on a quest to look for universals.
25:14
What
25:15
is common in all human music.
25:17
You can then imagine the temptation, not being able to define it easily, to draw upon the word human.
25:27
Music is humanly organized sound.
25:31
Let us say that.
25:32
But music is really what you say it is, human, superhuman, only certain humans across all species.
25:41
So many people ignore the vocal accomplishment and instead take up this idea of human uniqueness and, I guess, progress.
25:52
And although the capacity for music making emerged widely.
25:57
on an evolutionary path, evolutionary history with both animals and humans, I would argue.
26:04
We can't say that music evolves.
26:09
Art renews itself, it transforms, but it doesn't evolve if we want to use the word the way biologists do.
26:18
And of course, I would want to.
26:20
And so if we're accepting birdsong as music, we sort of join up then with Darwin in this kind of connectivity of all living beings.
26:30
So that's where I end up, I guess, is we could think of songbirds as ancient and substandard and primitive songs.
26:41
ancestors, or we could think of them as colleagues and contemporaries.
26:46
And I do.
26:47
Yeah.
26:48
Yeah.
26:48
No, that's a lovely way to think about it.
26:50
Have people like have musicologists thought about this in the context of cetacean, like whale sounds?
27:00
Has anyone analyzed those in the same way that you've been thinking about and analyzing Pied Butcher Birds?
27:07
Yes, they're starting to do that more and more, especially Alexander South in Scotland.
27:14
Yeah, that's cool too.
27:15
Because I mean, when you hear whale songs, like when you hear...
27:21
you know, records of humpback whales.
27:23
It really does evoke a feeling.
27:25
I mean, in a way that music does.
27:29
All right.
27:30
We've reached the part of the show we call That's BS or That's Bird Stuff, where we give our guests an opportunity to debunk a myth that ruffles their feathers.
27:37
So Hollis, what do you want to call BS on?
27:39
So some people complain that birdsong is less complex, less diverse, less inventive or innovative than human music.
27:49
But are they comparing the simplest birdsong, you know, the little twit?
27:55
which I guess could even have nuance, but you'd have to get in there and analyze it.
28:00
Are they comparing that to the most complex human music?
28:04
Because we know that most popular and folk music, for example, is highly repetitive and formulaic and simple.
28:13
So I call BS on how...
28:16
Ideas like consciousness and function and language play an outsized role in how we're going to think about animal music and animal activities.
28:28
So I call BS on people who are only in dialogue with cliches of birdsong.
28:34
And I really hope that Pied Butcher birds will give them a broader and a deeper understanding of avian accomplishments.
28:42
Totally.
28:42
That's awesome.
28:43
I love that.
28:45
Yeah.
28:45
Well, thanks so much for joining us, Hollis.
28:47
It's been really amazing to chat about birds and music and these amazing Pied Butcher birds.
28:52
Thank you.
28:57
Birds are dinosaurs, and around here we like our snacks, so we end each episode with a dinosaur nugget.
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Today's nugget is, songbirds have been singing tunes for around 50 million years, which is roughly 49.7 million years longer than humans have.
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A single-pied butcher bird in the Australian outback can sing for seven hours straight through the night, almost never repeating itself, and come back the next spring with an entirely new repertoire.
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So the next time someone tells you music is a uniquely human invention, you can let them know we are at best a cover band.
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That's a wrap on this week's episode, Okay, But Did Birds Invent Music?
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If you liked this episode, leave us a rating, a review, or like and subscribe.
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We'll catch you next time.
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Bye!
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Okay, But Birds is hosted by Scott Taylor with production and creative by Zach Carl.