While switching from electronic music to recording natural sound, I found my curiosity evolve from questions about the elements of music to questions about its origins. Each question drew me farther down the rabbit hole of musical mysteries. Where does our urge to make music come from? What might be the connection between biophony and human music? Does the emotional content of animal vocalizations shed any light on the fact that music is a primary means through which humans express emotion? When studying animal voices, I realized that not acknowledging the context in which animals vocalize—the biophony—caused us to miss a crucial part of the big picture. Could the same be true for music? When seeking explanations for the structure and intent in our music, have we been ignoring the context in which humans first began to control sound? How did the sonic structure inherent in biophony impact human expression to take the form of music? Did murmurs from the wild that suggest rhythm, melody, polyphony, and design serve as the organizational basis of musical expression? My fascination with these questions has animated much of my life to this day.
With the advent of the ecological consciousness that has sprung up in the last half century, only occasional attention has been paid to natural sound. But in response to the primary focus on recording, archiving, and studying the voices of individual, out-of-context creatures, a more holistic sense of the biophonic world is finally beginning to flourish. Studies of natural sound and its connection to human expression in the form of music, however, have been even slower to materialize. The great preponderance of research, articles, and books on the subject are still primarily anthropocentric and solipsistic, essentially stating that music springs from us alone or that we are the ultimate judges of what is musical in the world. Perhaps we are. But we’re starting to see research that suggests a wider field of influence.
At a Google-O’Reilly Science Foo conference held in Mountain View, California, in 2008, Aniruddh Patel and a few of his colleagues showed a video of a cockatoo, its head and body weaving and bobbing, its feet shuffling from side to side in pretty close sync to the beat of a pulsating sound track. When the tempo shifted, so did the response of the bird, suggesting that non-human animals respond to rhythm (ours, of course). And many articles—including one in Wired—have focused on the seemingly innate rhythm of newborns, learned at the embryo stage from the heartbeat of the mother and from music detected outside the womb. Almost nothing has been said about the non-human rhythms of crickets or chorusing frogs, or ocean waves, or dripping water after rain, but one researcher, Björn Merker, along with some colleagues, has tentatively crossed the line to factor in other species, some closely related to humans, when considering the “evenly paced” group synchrony model (i.e., tapping or dancing to the same beat). While he concludes that the actual mechanisms of the behavior are poorly understood, there is some evidence to infer that at least synchronous rhythm structures in humans may have evolved from other species.
Nils Wallin, a Swedish scientist, coined the term biomusicology in 1991. Around that time, researchers were beginning to dig deeper into our past, searching for the links between acoustic configurations that occur in the natural world and the evolution of human music. Reflecting on the possibilities, Wallin speculated that “our forebears might have been singing hominids before they became talking humans…. If so, that… would have some bearing on the way we approach the question of the origins of music.”
Of course, there are no hominid species other than Homo sapiens that exist in the present. But for clues about music’s origins, we can look to our cousins, the primates, as well as to other mammals. When I was in Rwanda recording mountain gorillas and their habitat, for hours I’d listen to them “sing” and watch their behavior. The gorillas expressed all kinds of emotions with sound. They would exchange greetings by a kind of soft, two-grunt clearing of the throat. Basically this meant that all was OK—a signal that all were feeling emotionally secure for the moment. If you articulated the sound just right, your presence would likely be accepted by the habituated groups. Females, particularly when grooming, often “sang” with an unself-conscious humming of short phrases—a sweet, easy series of random sounding notes. These classes of vocalizations have been dubbed “singing” by field observers because they sound very much like human females absentmindedly humming to themselves.
The whole scene would change when young-adult males, awash with testosterone, would look for a receptive female to practice with. Silverbacks, the dominant males, never take kindly to that behavior. Always focused on passing on their DNA to future generations, they respond with an enraged series of loud screams, chest beats, and full-body charges that no sentient being in his right mind would dare challenge. These vocalizations are not songs but dominance signals and warnings that are bursting with emotion. The aggressive screams that come from a pissed off gorilla are the loudest mammalian utterances I have ever heard on land. If you happen to be nearby when a silverback lets loose, you might be deaf for a while. Those alpha warning screams carry emotional content that you can only hope is not directed at you. I’ve also watched female chimps and gorillas whose babies have died; they carry the bodies around for days. Whimpering and crying sadly to themselves, they sit apart from their family groups, inconsolable.
We primates are well-known for our affinity to song. Researchers have characterized the vocalizations not only of mountain gorillas but of chimps, lemurs, lorisids, and monkeys as “singing.” Bonobo and gibbon “singing,” loaded with messages of intense sexual desire, can be heard throughout the forests of Africa and Asia, respectively, where healthy groups still thrive. Some of their singing reminds me of the unconscious humming I’ve caught myself in the midst of during my early-morning runs, when I’m transfixed by the rhythm of my breathing or footsteps, completely calm and relaxed into a natural tempo.
The songs of all the primates—humans included—are likely a transformation from loud calls that defined territory and expressed alarm to intricate patterns that express social connections. Through observations in the mid-1980s, John Mitani and Peter Marler found that gibbon male songs, while rarely repeated, nevertheless follow strict rules of modulation and delivery in order to successfully attract females. But what are the elements that qualify these primate vocalizations as “songs”? Since the field of animal communication is so new and research so recent, the best we can do is consider the underlying fundamental ideas of song to arrive at answers. We define the vocalizations of male humpback whales as “songs”—sequences of acquired expression repeated over and over during each mating and calving season and in fragments during summer feeding. Sitting among wild chimps and gorillas for long periods of time, I found that the distinct modulation of their random vocalizations as they’re grooming, playing, or foraging—those combinations of sound described by researchers as “singing”—generates an emotional state within the group that pacifies even a wary human. Whenever the gorillas allowed me to join them for their afternoon siestas, those vocalizations would ease me to sleep.
We can also find emotional expression in the sounds of other mammals. Killer whales live in highly social pods where syntax and “vocabulary”—that is, different kinds of whistles and screams—signal mood, food, and their relationships to pod members and other marine species. They have a special foraging sound when the pod is chasing after fish. And when attacking other marine mammals (which they occasionally do since they are carnivores), killer whales have unique aggressive vocalizations. These forceful, punctuated, and animated sequences are quite different than the normal syntactic social contact and feeding sounds that are more generally expressed between members of resident or transient pods. During August 1979, I recorded the vocalizations of three orcas attacking a humpback in Glacier Bay in a small cove (Fingers Bay) to the west of Willoughby Island. It was a unique and rare vocal exchange, never before captured on tape.
The most obvious example of orca emotion I’ve ever observed, however, came from a comparison of expressions between two whales that
had been held in captivity at a theme park and those of the still-wild pod from which they were originally taken. While working on my doctorate, I had an opportunity to record Yaka and Nepo, two captive animals at Marine World, then located in Belmont, California, just south of San Francisco. Wanting to compare syntax and other vocalizations, I set out in the summer of 1980 to record the wild pod from which they’d been taken, which still lived in the channel between Vancouver Island and the mainland of British Columbia. While syntactic similarities existed between the captives and their wild family, the ways in which the vocalizations were expressed felt quite different. The wild animals’ vocalizations were nearly always filled with energy and vitality. Quickly paced and assertive “up-screams” and “down-screams”—types of loud ascending and descending whistlelike vocalizations—were urgent and forceful. The captive vocalizations, by contrast, were palpably lethargic and slow.
Of course, there’s no precise way to quantify animal feelings or our impressions of their emotions, which is why researchers tend to stay clear of the subject—a scientist cannot be caught with his or her anthropomorphic pants down. I would guess, however, that most people who have pets would immediately agree that their animals show emotion. When our cat YoYo Meow wants something such as food or to go outside, he uses a particular plaintive, high-pitched voice, the meaning of which is unmistakable. But if you stroke his fur the wrong way, the voice converts to a low growl, a warning of “If you do that again…” My wife and I are fully trained.
Truly, the saddest vocalization I’ve ever heard emanating from a nonhuman didn’t come from a primate. It came from a beaver. A couple of years ago, a fellow recordist from the Midwest sent me an audio clip of an event that took place at one of his favorite recording and listening sites—a small remote lake in central Minnesota. While recording one spring day, he watched in stunned silence as a couple of game wardens appeared on the scene, planted some explosives, and blew up a beaver dam that had helped establish and maintain the subtle ecological balance of the habitat at the lake’s outlet for years. Since there were no houses or nearby farmland to be protected, it seemed like an act of willful violence and unnecessary authority. The beaver family, its young and female, were decimated when the dam was blown apart that day. Remaining behind after the wardens left, my friend captured an altered habitat that no photo could have revealed. After dusk, the surviving and probably wounded male swam in slow circles around the pond, crying out in obvious pain for its mate and progeny. Its voice is so forlorn and heartbreaking that the recording is always emotionally difficult for me to hear. Although tail slaps and moaning sounds of beavers in and around their dens have been heard and even recorded on a few rare occasions, that’s the first and only time I’ve heard beaver vocalizations of this type. I hope I never witness cries like those coming from a living being again. The most heartrending human music I’ve ever heard doesn’t come close.
My experience in the wild has yielded countless examples of emotional expression in many mammals—sounds that thus have become part of the fabric of biophonic structure. In fact, sound is one of the principal ways in which animals show emotion. Humans, too, with our voices and with music.
In The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin imagined the evolutionary connection between human music and emotion. That some of the meaning of music is sexual, as Darwin suggested, became clear to me the minute I switched from violin to guitar as a teenager. But music also has meaning in times of war, when seeking relief from stress, in spiritual settings, in communal contact and identification, and when expressing a wide range of emotion, from joy to sorrow. Often I don’t need to understand a single word of a person’s native language to know how they feel. They can just hum a melody or even utter a series of nonverbal sounds, and I’ll know more about their mood than any words could express. It doesn’t matter if the person comes from remote groups living on the North Slope of Alaska or in the rain forests of Papua New Guinea.
Does this mean that for humans the urge to make music is innate? Debates on the evolutionary basis of music are notoriously heated. Darwin seemed to think that music was an evolutionary adaptation, but not all contemporary scientists are so sure. The MIT cognitive scientist Steven Pinker famously dismissed the idea by calling music “auditory cheesecake.” We like cheesecake because we evolved a taste for fats and sugars, the components of cheesecake—we didn’t evolve a desire for cheese-cake itself. We like music, the argument goes, because we evolved a liking for some of the components of music, which presumably have functions related to language. Music itself, however, is not an adaptation. “Music is useless,” he wrote in The Language Instinct in 1994.
But in the 2006 book The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind, and Body, the archaeologist Steven Mithen elaborates on the possible evolutionary origins of music by suggesting that language was preceded by something neither specifically linguistic nor musical but an amalgam he termed “Hmmmm”: Holistic, multimodal, manipulative, musical, and mimetic. Another researcher, Christopher Small, devised an even better term, musicking, by which he meant “to music.” He asserts that singing, humming a tune, tapping one’s feet to a rhythm, playing an instrument, performing in an orchestra, and composing music all reflect a single activity that can be captured with the verb to musick.
In a review of Mithen’s book, William Benzon, a cognitive scientist and musician, walks us through his own discoveries and hypotheses on the origins of music. His explanation begins with rhythm, specifically that of walking, where the coordination of biped muscles is central to balance and pacing. Drawing from rhythm, members of modern human groups would synchronize their pacing, clapping, shuffling, walking, or leaping in coordination with one another, a kind of musicking that resulted in the uniting of individual personalities and in their merging harmoniously with the group—a cooperation with reciprocal benefits. I would guess that most of us have experienced this synchronization to music at some point in our lives—such as when we dance or tap our feet to a particular rhythm.
When I was in my early teens, I experienced a moment that could have occurred at any time in human history. It was summer in the early 1950s, and my parents unloaded me at a camp located in the middle of Algonquin Park, Ontario. The usual eight weeks of summer activities—baseball, swimming, tennis, and team competitions—temporarily distracted most of the inmates in our coed enclave (those not otherwise struck by the onslaught of coming-of-age stirrings, that is). Yet ten days that summer stand out above all. Twelve of us—a Native guide, two counselors, and nine anxious, citified, testosterone-driven teenage male campers—took a twenty-mile canoe trip a few days’ paddle away from our base. To get to our destination—a remote lake—we traversed many wilderness waterways and endured long portages through swarms of leeches, mosquitoes, and the nasty biting black flies of the Canadian boreal forest, with our mighty ninety-pound, cedar-ribbed, canvas-covered Chestnut canoes and all our gear.
Within a few hours on the water, we learned to temper our egos and to work together as a group—imperative if people are to survive in anything like the wild. Every now and then, when we got tired, our counselors urged us into song, the tempo of which set the pace for our collective paddling. Together, we slogged on. With cupped hands, we drank water so pure and sweet from the lakes and streams that even we noticed the contrast in taste between this natural liquid and what we had known in the cities and suburbs, where most of us lived. The water was clear enough that we could spot huge lake trout swimming ten or fifteen feet below the surface. To supplement our basic supplies, we caught fish and cooked and ate them as we traveled—often snagging those that we saw lurking in deep pools as we leaned over the gunwales of our canoes. Guided only by a few paper topographical maps, the sun, the stars, and the moss that grew on the north side of trees, we managed to navigate quite safely to each night’s campsite.
I clearly remember the complete sense of tranquillity. Even my peers managed to button it up for long periods of time ou
t of fear of breaking the natural hush, or out of newfound reverence, or both. In more than a week on the water, we never heard a plane, motorboat, car, chain saw, or radio. We never saw another person outside our immediate group. Sometimes we felt lost and not lost—right at the level of tension that makes one feel alive and alert.
At night, camping along the shorelines, we’d build a fire and burn pine boughs to keep away the incessant mosquitoes and flies. Otherwise we were surrounded by real darkness broken only by the brilliance of the night sky. The counselors would break into loud song when they were anxious, beckoning us to join in. We needed to make our human presence known to the lingering animal spirits that we vividly conjured up in our minds.
Group singing is particularly reassuring during those moments when everyone joins in and lends power to the chorus. Mithen, who believes that music is deeply rooted in human evolutionary history, explains that it enables social bonding and the communication necessary to signal the direction of existing game, the organization of a hunt, a coming-of-age ritual, sexual attraction, and just plain expressions of joy or sadness.
I think that we can look at music as an acoustic mirror—it reflects our culture and our surroundings at any point in time. If Mithen and others are right in claiming that our urge to make music is innate—that humans may have even been making music before they were using language—we can look to the context in which we evolved for clues about music’s origins.
Of course, we are now far removed from our origins—that is, our acoustic environments have radically changed—and our musical forms elegantly reflect this break from our past. Starting in the 1950s, for example, a few avant-garde composers—including John Cage, Vladimir Ussachevsky, and Otto Luening—picked up on philosophical vestiges of the Italian futurists and utilized the combined sounds of urban environments to create experimental sonic works. When taken out of their original milieus and placed in new ones, fragments of noise became structural components of composition.
The Great Animal Orchestra Page 11