Marko Tkach's Ornithology

Can bird sounds really be captured on a sheet of paper?

When I try to describe a bird’s song to somebody else, I usually describe it phonetically. Sometimes, of course, this is easier than other times: for example, while a chickadee’s song can easily be characterized as “fee-bee”, the house wren’s long, rolling whistle lacks a written equivalent. However, our alphabet has only 26 letters, while every one of the estimated 10,000 living species of birds has a unique and inimitable song. To make matters worse for us, some birds are capable of singing two notes at once thanks to their specialized vocal structure, called a syrinx (as opposed to our larynx). Even if two people try to sing these songs in harmony, how can we possibly imitate the effect of two sounds from one stream of air emanating from less than an inch apart?

We can try to use conventional musical notation and dynamics to capture a bird’s songs, especially ones that sound “melodic” to us. Here are some examples (from npr.org). First, look at the written transcriptions. Try to sing or play them on an instrument of your choice. What do they tell you, and what do they leave you to guess? Now, listen to the recordings (links below).

Black-Capped Chickadee


Listen: http://www.npr.org/templates/gallery/index.php?gallery=5261830&slide=9

Song Sparrow


Listen: http://www.npr.org/templates/gallery/index.php?gallery=5261830&slide=2
Compare the recordings to the written transcriptions. How accurate do the transcriptions seem? What information is conveyed, and what is “missing”?


About the sounds of nature, especially birds, the influential jazz saxophonist and flautist Eric Dolphy once said,

“It somehow comes in as part of the development of what I’m doing. Sometimes I can’t do it. At home (in California), I used to play, and the birds always used to whistle with me. I would stop what I was working on and play with the birds... Birds have notes in between our notes - you try to imitate something they do and, like, maybe it's between F and F#, and you'll have to go up or come down on the pitch...Indian music has something of the same quality - different scales and quarter tones.”

Although Dolphy found birds’ songs a unique inspiration for his music and strived to emulate their character, he admitted that their complexity went beyond what we would normally consider “music”. This adds another layer of challenge to transcribing bird songs. We can approximate where a bird’s song might fit on Western scales, but certain noises cannot quite find a “home” on a Western staff. For example, the house wren’s chattering glissando (listen at http://www.mbr-pwrc.usgs.gov/id/framlst/i7210id.html) is not only difficult to write out because of the rhythm’s subtleties, but also because the tones themselves have no equivalent in any Western scale. The song also varies every time (unlike, say, a chickadee’s “fee-bee!”), so a very accurate transcription of a given phrase may actually be confusing to some. In response to the many bird songs that cannot be transcribed onto a conventional staff, some alternative notations have been developed. These notations were designed with the infinite tones of bird songs, not the twelve notes of Western music, in mind. The first example below utilizes lines along with accent marks over letters, while the second example’s lines portray the pitch change and length of each note.

Alternate methods of notation for transcribing bird songs:

A Guide to Bird Songs. Aretas A. Saunders: Doubleday and Company, Inc, 1951

“Sonogram” method - A Guide to Field Identification of Birds of North America: Robbins, Bruun, Zim, and Singer, 1966

It might sound complicated, but it’s not all that much different…
Musicians and birds do share a love (or perhaps a need) for improvisation, however. Just like us, birds convey messages and thoughts through music. The speed of a chickadee’s warning call - a buzzy “chick-a-dee-dee...” (not to be confused with its song, “fee-bee!”) - and the number of “dees” relay the perceived threat level of a predator. (You can listen to it here: http://www.mbr-pwrc.usgs.gov/id/framlst/i7350id.html) Small, swift hawks and owls receive the greatest number of “dees” in response, according to this website. Chickadees, of course, do not have much time to think when a predator is looming, so they cannot hesitate to belt out an urgent warning call; they need to be skilled “improvisers”.
What can we learn from the humble chickadee’s warning calls? When we improvise, we need to respond to cues in our environment: (quick) observation is the first stage of this process. For example, when we solo in an ensemble, we need to pay attention to the chord changes and the rhythm. What is the character of the song, and what emotions am I feeling? Likewise, a chickadee sings or calls in response to what it sees in its surroundings. Should a chickadee sing to attract a mate, or should it warn other chickadees about a possible predator? Birds and humans both need to “improvise” through quick decisions. Expressing these decisions is the final stage of this larger process.

Laura Kates / Child Psychology and Music

Laura Kates (by the way she is an amazing drummer! ) Senior Project

Child Psychology and Music

My final project for jazz was to play four songs off of Francisco’s album “School of Enlightenment” for a first grade class and have them create pictures while they were listening to the songs. The four songs I played for the class were “Early Shift”, “Budejovica”, “Baron”, and “Tatui”. Before I played the first song I explained to the class that their job was to draw what the music made them feel like drawing, whether it was a duck or a squiggle or a design, or something the music reminded them of. I also made sure to mention that they shouldn’t pay attention to their neighbor or feel that they were wrong to draw what they chose to draw because they were the only one who thought of that particular thing. The following paper is an analysis of what I believe went on in these children’s heads while they were participating in this experiment.
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One of the most wonderful characteristics of young children is their invaluable ability to be brutally honest in any given situation. Teenagers and adults recognize the social stigma that can sometimes be equated with honesty, and they are therefore rarely as straightforward. For example, if a woman had a mole on her face, most people above the age of twelve would choose to ignore it. However, a child between the ages of two and eleven may feel compelled to ask a question or make a comment that society would generally view as inappropriate, such as “What’s that weird thing on your face?” This interesting psychosocial difference can be explained using Erik Erikson’s Stages of Psychosocial Development.

Erikson’s Stages of Psychosocial Development

As you can see from this chart, Erikson divided human social development into eight stages; Infancy, Early Childhood, Preschool, School Age, Adolescence, Young Adulthood, Middle Adulthood, and Maturity. Each of these stages represent different periods of time during a human lifespan and – according to Erikson - in each of these stages a human deals with a different social dilemma. Young children can be placed in the categories of Early Childhood, Preschool, and School Age, but the children I dealt with during this informal experiment were in the first grade, putting them in the School Age group. School Age youngsters are dealing with the “Industry vs. Inferiority” stage of their life. This predicament indicates that a child in this age group is being faced with new challenges, both socially and academically. If he is successful in dealing with these challenges he feels a sense of competence, or “industry”. If he struggles, he feels that he is incompetent, or “inferior”. Examples of academic challenges may be tasks such as writing his name, completing mathematical equations, or spelling a word correctly. Examples of social challenges may be making new friends, dealing with bullying, or pleasing authority figures, such as his parents or his teachers. The desire for social competence is a perfect explanation of why children this age are so prone to succumbing to peer pressure; it’s a psychological necessity to fit in.
First graders are additionally interesting because they are in fact in a transition stage between Preschool and School Age. This means that although they are dealing with “Industry vs. Inferiority” they are also dealing with “Initiative vs. Guilt”, a quandary that explains the brutal honesty of youngsters that I touched on earlier. “Initiative vs. Guilt” denotes that a child, typically between the ages of three and five, feels the need to be in control of his environment. He feels that one way he can achieve this is to speak his mind and convince those around him that he is right. However, if he tries to exert too much power he may be reprimanded, causing him to have a sense of guilt. In the example of a child making a comment about a woman’s mole, the child’s mother may have taken him aside and yelled at him for being rude, causing him to feel guilty for taking too much initiative. “Initiative vs. Guilt” is also known as the stage where children typically learn right from wrong.

Early Shift
Ratio of obscure designs to specific images: 4:8

Many of the specific images produced used the color blue, which may have come Gretchen’s constant mention of “rain”. However, interestingly enough, none of the children actually drew anything having to do with rain, meaning that they were not consciously paying attention to the lyrics of the song. In one picture there is a blue girl, surrounded by musical notes, standing in front of what appears to be a purple sky. In the top right-hand corner of the paper, the child drew a smiley face. Another picture was simply a huge yellow smiley face surrounded by stars. The child who drew this picture was sitting next to the child who drew the picture of the blue girl; here is an example of “Industry vs. Inferiority”. The child saw that the other had drawn a smiley face, and thus he felt the necessity to draw the same image.


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Budejovica
Ratio of obscure designs to specific images: 5:7

Interestingly, all of the specific images created during this song included elements of nature. One was a picture of a whale in the ocean, another was a boat sitting in the water, and the rest were of various trees and flowers. Many of the obscure designs incorporated dots.

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Baron
Ratio of obscure images to specific designs: 2:10

Smiley faces were a common occurrence in these pictures, as were rainbows. One little girl drew an elephant; before doing so she looked at me and started giggling, and proceeded to say, “This song sounds like an elephant!” (Here is an example of Initiative). An interesting incident that occurred during this song was the creation of two almost identical pictures by two children who were sitting on entirely opposite sides of the room:


Tatui
Ratio of obscure images to specific designs: 4:8

One picture that was very interesting to me was a picture that seemed as if the child had remembered an experience he had while listening to this song. The image is of three people on a camping trip staring up into the night sky, exclaiming while they stare at the stars. This picture was entirely unlike any of the other pictures created while this song was playing, showing that perhaps this youngster was actually venturing ahead into the next cycle of Social Development, called “Identity vs. Role Confusion”. The originality of this picture showed that he was able to stay true to himself and disregard the pictures around him.

It was during this song that I also experienced another example of Initiative. One little boy, in the middle of the song, grumbled, “Why do all of these songs sound the same?”
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This experiment was an excellent way for me to learn more about psychosocial development in children. It was also very interesting to witness the different ways each of these first graders responded to jazz music in place of the music they normally listen to, such as pop or rock. A few things I’m still wondering about are why did that one kid think that all the songs sounded the same and how was it that two kids – sitting on completely opposite sides of the room – drew nearly the same picture (?!)

Karan Takar Senior project for Jazz Performance

I have decided to share some of my students work in my blog. The goal is to generate discussion and curiosity about diverse topics in music. Also you will realize the brilliant minds that surround me on a daily basis...
Have fun reading about this musical explorations.


Music through the eyes of the Fibonacci Sequence

The Fibonacci sequence is one of the most famous sets of numbers ever discovered and explored in mathematics. The sequence was discovered by the Italian mathematician Leonardo of Pisa, who proposed the idea as an answer to a question about the growth of a rabbit family in his book Liber Abaci. The rule determining the series is that any number is equal to the sum of the previous two numbers, with the first numbers being 1 and 1 (the first few terms are 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, and 34). The most important facet of the Fibonacci sequence for the purpose of this investigation, however, is the Golden Ratio. The ratio, also known by its Greek name φ, equals 1.618 ((1 + sqrt(5))/2) and is the value that the ratio of consecutive terms of the Fibonacci sequence approach as the sequence reaches very large numbers (34/21 = 1.619, 55/34 = 1.6176, 89/55 = 1.6181, etc;). Now enough of the introduction and on to the music!

Our first stop in our mathematical journey will be the marvelous musical miniature known as Frederic Chopin’s Prelude, specifically Prelude No. 1 in C major. For the purposes of this piece, we will focus only on the melodic line in the right hand (it’s the top voice in the following picture. Note that the piece lasts exactly 34 measures: this is our first hint that the Fibonacci sequence may play a role here. The first 28 measures of the piece contains two notes separated by a second (major or minor, with the whole note harmonizing with the left hand). Of specific importance to us is the position of the climaxes in the melody line. The melody begins with the note sequence G – A, rises to a temporary climax at E – D in measure 5 (a Fibonacci number), and then eventually hitting the biggest climax on the D – C notes in measure 21. Not only is 21 a number belonging to the Fibonacci sequence, the ratio 34/21 = 1.619 is extremely close to the golden ratio! In fact, a large number of Chopin’s preludes and more contemporary pieces by composers such as James Tenney make use of this pleasing divide between the build up of a piece and the winding down stage.

Another interesting aspect of music involving the Golden Ratio is the structure of the form of a piece. The most common form structure in music is a binary form (A – B), so let’s take a look at these pieces in particular. There are two general classes of binary form: equal binary form, in which the A and B sections are roughly equal in size, and unequal binary form, where there is a large difference in the length of the A and B sections (equal binary form is the preferred form construction in most jazz music using a binary form). The question we ask is how does a composer assign a length to the two sections of an unequal binary form? The answer, as we will discover shortly, is that composers tend to split the two sections proportional to the Golden Ratio. One of the best examples of this Golden construction can be found in the first movements of the Piano Sonatas of none other than Mozart himself. Mozart’s sonatas were developed in the sonata-allegro form, an invention of the late 1700s. The sonata-allegro form consists of two basic sections, each of which is repeated during the movement: the first part is the exposition, where the musical elements of the piece are first presented (it is repeated so that the listener can fully grasp what is being presented in the piece). The second part of the form contains the development, where the elements of the exposition are distorted and glued together in different ways to increase tension towards the climax, and the recapitulation, where the piece returns to the head, but with a number of subtle changes. Thus the form of the first movement of a Mozart sonata looks like this (this is called rounded binary form because the second part contains a repeat of the first):

||: A :||: B A :||

Out of the 18 piano sonatas composed by Mozart, 17 use the sonata-allegro form (the other one is composed of variations on a theme). A study of the measure length of the respective sections of the sonatas shows that the ratio of second section length to first section length is exactly equal to the Golden Ratio in six of the sonatas (35%), and another 8 (47%) are so close that they are considered to round to the Golden Ratio.

Why does the division of the form into Golden Ratio sections sound so appealing to the listener, and why does jazz not use this form?

Most music students in America struggle with compound additive rhythms such as 3 + 2 + 3/9 (3 beats stressed added to 2 unstressed and then 3 more stressed), but in countries such as Bulgaria these meters are common in folk dance songs and newer popular work. Why does the Western world focus on divisive (breaking the measure down into beats) rhythms while Eastern Europe has developed additive rhythms?