Neon green, yellow and blue budgies circle around David Rothenberg’s head. He plays a few jazz licks on his clarinet. If the birds are paying attention to him, they may join in, riffing on his patterns, he says.
But this day at the aviary in West Orange’s Turtle Back Zoo, it’s raining. And while the birds are shrieking animatedly, Rothenberg says they’re in no mood to sing.
Dr. Doolittle, eat your heart out.
Rothenberg, sometimes referred to as an "interspecies musician," teaches music and philosophy at the New Jersey Institute of Technology.
He is also the author of "Why Birds Sing," which examines bird song through science, music and poetry. He has shared songs with whales from Hawaii to Russia and released
a book in 2008, "Thousand Mile Song," about their music.
Also a composer and jazz clarinetist, with seven CDs released under his name, the professor received NJIT’s prestigious Excellence in Research prize Oct. 6.
"David practically made the assertion that bird song is music," says Ofer Tchernichovski, a neuroscientist at City University of New York, who also studies bird song. Rothenberg’s work "is quite valuable because the direction it’s going is little developed," Tchernichovski says.
"David’s view here is affecting how we try to understand the biology of art, beauty and aesthetics."
And, yes, he jams with the birds — with the birds who want to jam, anyway.
"It’s rare to find these creatures that really interact with you," Rothenberg says.
"A lot of times, they don’t care. They’re kind of like people; you have to find someone really into music who wants to play along."
Rothenberg, 48, has devoted much of his professional life to finding out just which creatures are willing to sing with him and what it might mean for music and science. In addition to playing in aviaries and to birds outside his home in Cold Spring, N.Y. — where, he says, feathered friends perch on the bushes near his garage to listen and sometimes join in — Rothenberg has also transmitted his music to whales, via underwater speakers. His next book, due out next year, focuses on insect sounds.
A Harvard graduate who created his own music and communication major and then spent time playing jazz in Europe, Rothenberg first approached his role as avian accompanist out of musical curiosity. By slowing down the recorded sound of a hermit thrush, he found something he likened to a Miles Davis trumpet solo.
Sped-up clicking sounds that came from whales became a backbeat for a work he composed.
As we understand how and why animals use music, we may gain insight into its role in evolution, for animals and for humans, he says.
For example, there are known reasons that birds make sounds — mate attraction and territory defense — but Rothenberg’s approach has been one of few to take a serious look at what the significance of each unique song might be.
"You can actually understand nature through music," he says.
Each species has its own aesthetic sense, its own style, with females responding to certain songs.
And "for really no reason in particular — that’s the idea that aesthetics is important to evolution," he says.
"It makes nature seem more frivolous, but, in fact, I think that’s evolution — survival of the interesting, not really the fittest."
NJIT vice president Donald Sebastian, who was involved in the selection of Rothenberg for the award, says the criteria for Rothenberg’s award included work that transcends academia — work that a person on the street could understand and appreciate, and that could have a social impact.
Although he’s a musician and philosopher, Rothenberg is "using the same methodologies a chemist or physicist might, and he may actually grab something with respect to models of communication that scientists may have missed," Sebastian says.
"People from the science world tend to think of animal communication as a simplified version of human interaction, like talking with a 3-year-old or a 1-year-old," says Sebastian.
Rothenberg has come at a different perspective, he says, by using his musical ear to pick up patterns that may later evoke specific responses.
"We shouldn’t be looking for words — ‘chirp chirp’ doesn’t mean ‘there’s a worm over there.’ It’s more of an emotional communication.
"There’s a certain universality in music. Whether it’s a tear that comes to your eye in an Italian opera aria or a riff in a James Brown song that gets you off your seat, you don’t need to understand the words."
Rothenberg is used to reactions of disbelief — and he himself wasn’t always sure the animal kingdom would respond to his art.
"I thought, ‘They don’t care about us,’ " he says.
Then one morning, while he enjoyed a little outdoor music-making, a white-crested laughing thrush started playing along. If people of different musical traditions can improvise together, he thought, why not go one step further?
"I thought birds just sang their own songs, but there was that moment when this bird was really interacting," he says. "I learned that in this species, the males and females sing together. They sing very complex duets — laughing thrushes really jam with each other."
a trained ear
Bird song and birdcalls are different. While the calls are instinctual and convey definite meanings — "there’s a hawk nearby" — the birds also utter songs that don’t have explicit meanings.
"It is much more like music than language," says Rothenberg. "You can’t really translate it to something else. Like a Bach solo invention, you can say it has form; you can say there’s a right and wrong way to sing it. They can sing incorrectly and other birds will know."
Still, Rothenberg hesitates to ascribe specific feelings to what he hears from down under and up above. Even between human cultures, musical meaning is hard to pin down; tritones, intervals that Westerners hear as harsh and dissonant, are popular in Ethiopian rock, he notes. And the meanings of Indian ragas, which are meant to correspond with certain mind-sets and occasions, can be elusive to Western ears.
"Humans routinely weep when they hear whale songs, and there’s no doubt about animals expressing emotions," Rothenberg says.
"But it’s hard to say a minor chord is even unhappy."
"These days, it's quite an early stage of his work in terms of how
it's causing a bridging of disciplines between art and science," says Tchernichovski.
"It’s a huge task that he’s taking on himself."
If you purchase a product or register for an account through a link on our site, we may receive compensation. By using this site, you consent to our User Agreement and agree that your clicks, interactions, and personal information may be collected, recorded, and/or stored by us and social media and other third-party partners in accordance with our Privacy Policy.
RetroSearch is an open source project built by @garambo | Open a GitHub Issue
Search and Browse the WWW like it's 1997 | Search results from DuckDuckGo
HTML:
3.2
| Encoding:
UTF-8
| Version:
0.7.4