Do you hum when getting dressed? Whistle on your daily commute? Do you sing (tunefully or otherwise) in the shower? Are you musical?
Musicality is a human trait, and it’s universal, spanning all cultures, ages and tastes. It echoes from the sombre dirges of remote tribal funerary rites to the eclectic tunes at a barn dance; from rhythmic drumming that accompanies coming-of-age ceremonies to the latest chart-topper that you just can’t help belting out. But is music a uniquely human trait?
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To answer this question, we have to start at the beginning, and agree on what music is. And isn’t. It seems simple enough, but even within our own species, there are many of us who might not define music the same way as our colleagues, friends and family.
In fact, just dipping your toe into how we define music in a universally accepted way can quickly lead you into very deep waters indeed. Because music, even in a human-centric capacity, is much more than just singing – it’s also instrumentalists tapping, plucking, drumming and blowing to create a rhythm. Where musicality starts and ends may not always be obvious.
The music of bird song
Maybe it’s easier to forget about humans for a bit, with all our cultures and societies and influences, and focus instead on birds. Birds are definitely musical. We even use terms such as ‘song’ and ‘chorus’ to describe the sounds they make and when they make them.
Nonetheless, while I’m content acknowledging the singing repertoire of a song thrush or a robin, I’m less likely to tap my foot to the raucous cry of a herring gull or the guttural call of a grey heron.
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Back in 1998, studying the relationships between animal songs and human music, Emily Doolittle, a lecturer in composition at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, was inspired by an early morning encounter with a European blackbird.
She noted how short bits of its pre-dawn song sounded quite a lot like human music, comprising brief scalar passages, miniature arpeggios and repeated motifs. But the way the bird strung everything together didn’t quite sound like human music.
Transcribing the blackbird’s song, Doolittle wrote down a number of motifs that she heard, and then created her own piece. First, she arranged the motifs the way she believed the blackbird would, then gradually transitioned into something more synonymous with human-like musical organisation.
The ensuing piece, entitled Night Blackbird Song, was a lively mix of sound created with two flutes and various percussion instruments.
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In addressing whether the blackbird is (or isn’t) musical, she concluded, “It doesn’t really matter whether we call animal song music or not, it’s going to depend on our own personal definition.”
Despite her open-ended view, Doolittle still believes that human music and animal song are similar enough that we can use the tools available for music analysis to better understand animal song.
It’s hardly surprising that birds are the main contenders for ‘nature’s musicians’, having inspired poets, playwrights, composers and musicians for millennia.
But, because birds share so many musical aptitudes with humans, it becomes more difficult to recognise and confirm musicality in other species, whose abilities differ from our own and may appear less ‘musical’, when judged by human-centred definitions.
Underwater symphonies
To find the most talented of nature’s musicians, a good place to start is in the water. At just 12mm long, Danionella cerebrum, a recently discovered close relative of the zebra fish, is one of the smallest vertebrates on the planet.
In order to attract a female, the male plucks a specially calcified rib against its hollow swim bladder, alternating it rhythmically at either 60 or 120Hz. Not only do these tiny aquatic drummers seem musically adept, but the drumming registers at an almost deafening 140 decibels, louder than most rock gigs.
Weakly electric knifefish from the murky rivers and lakes of South America use their incredible internal ‘battery’ cells to produce a series of electrical waves which, if you happen to be an inquisitive undergraduate with a hydrophone (as I once was), resemble the bizarre and wholly unique music created by an electric theremin. (New to the theremin? Search for one online – it won’t disappoint.)
Then, of course, there are noisy choruses of frogs vying for attention, and the various species of European water boatmen that use their minuscule penises like a fiddler’s bow to produce a rhythmic sound underwater so loud it can be heard from the riverbank.
The aquatic world, it seems, is full of what is starting to sound a lot like music, albeit not always with obvious rhythms. But to meet the real rock stars of the underwater world, where music is not only produced but is, like our own, subject to culture, trends and even regional dialects, we have to head into the depths of the open ocean and look at the largest creatures on Earth.
Whales, noted late biologist and whale conservation pioneer Roger Payne, “give the ocean its voice”. Famed for their complex songs, humpback whales sing across oceans to one another and between groups.
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Why do animals sing?
While some songs appear to have territorial and courtship meanings, there are others that remain a mystery, and it’s easy to wonder whether, like us, whales just enjoy a good old sing-song every now and again. Scientists studying humpback whale songs pore over their recordings as computer transcriptions, pulling them apart to discover form, change, rhythm and phrasing.
For our own species, music is very often constrained by the physical features of our breath, in particular its length. This connection between physiology and musical expression isn’t unique to humans. In the animal kingdom, those with faster heart-rates tend to sing more rapidly and produce shorter songs.
In contrast, whales, whose hearts beat as slowly as two to 10 times per minute (compared to the adult human 72 beats per minute), and who can hold their breath for an hour or more, are responsible for marathon-length jamming sessions.
In addition to her work on birds, Doolittle has carried out detailed research into how humpback whales sing and learn their songs. These giants are famed for singing very long songs, ranging in length from 30 minutes to an impressive 22 hours, and Doolittle’s work helps us to better understand the anatomy of these incredible performances.
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The songs, she explains, are comprised of numerous ‘themes’, each of which is, in turn, made up from a number of smaller, repeated ‘phrases’.
Humpback song goes through the themes, always in the same order, and while it’s possible to miss a particular theme out, it appears these whales wouldn’t dream of singing the themes in the ‘wrong’ order. Sometimes, they incorporate actual rhymes between the phrases, and change the songs over time, creating a song structure that is, with a little imagination, not too dissimilar to our own.
With bowhead and beluga whales being just a few of the other musical cetaceans, our oceans appear to be full of vocally talented, super-sized superstars.
When we add the haunting, sonorous songs of gibbon pairs echoing through south-east Asian forests each morning and the raucous cacophony of chimpanzee drumming and calls, alongside the plethora of singing and instrumentally gifted mammals, amphibians, birds and insects, the animal kingdom begins to
resemble a veritable karaoke bar, albeit with a mixed level of talent.
If we are prepared to accept the existence of musicality outside our own species, then we need to play the ‘what if’ card and see just how far music might exist in nature.
Can plants sing?
If we can argue music exists in the animal kingdom, what about the plant kingdom? Musical plants might not be as far-fetched as we might think.
There are, for instance, a surprising and pleasantly optimistic amount of studies and ideas behind the heartbeat-like ‘ultrasonic acoustic emissions’ made by trees as the xylem and the phloem ‘vessels’ pump hundreds, even thousands, of litres of water within the tree under enormous pressures.
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With the discoveries of the almost-constant popping of tiny air bubbles within plant vessels
(a process known as ‘cavitation’), and what some researchers believe might even be ultrasonic sound beyond the range of human hearing, it appears plants may have the potential to be musical.
Your garden pond might actually be the most unexpected source of floral music, with the sound of aquatic plants releasing the oxygen created through photosynthesis in the form of minuscule bubbles, combined with the steady beat made by gases released through the decomposition of vegetation in the pond bed’s muddy layers.
The effect is fairytale melody blended with what can only be described as underwater techno.
Are animals musical?
Music appears to be the ultimate expression of subjectivity. It seems that one monkey’s noise is another person’s symphony, but even the very language we use shapes our idea of what is and isn’t music, with terms such as noisy, jarring, soothing, melodious and rhythmic all stirring up different reactions and feelings.
The notion of music as a universal category encompassing everything from the complex playing of instruments to human singing, is a largely western concept – one that seeks to encompass diverse traditions, genres and styles within a single framework.
Yet many languages and societies, from across Indonesia, China and Japan to many African cultures, existed for millennia without this catch-all idea. Instead, they developed wholly separate concepts around sound production and music, with many seemingly unconcerned with the more rigid and proscriptive definitions of what music is, and isn’t, that have been traditionally more constrained in western cultures.
We can define music, label it, set clear boundaries and parameters, and subject it to rules in order to better understand it. We could dissect music into its component parts, separating out each constituent aspect like meticulously pinned dried insects in a museum display, to prove or disprove whether music is unique to our own species.
But then again, the more we treat this endlessly expressive form of art like a laboratory experiment, the less we may feel, appreciate and love its full scope.
Maybe there is scope for other species, and whole groups of species, to be musical. Even Darwin wrote that animals can detect and appreciate melody and rhythm, simply because they have a nervous system comparable to that of humans.
If the idea that human musicality has a biological foundation and a long evolutionary history was good enough for Darwin, then surely that is enough for us. Maybe nature isn’t just a muse for generations of countless artists and musicians, but is instead full of teachers, and perhaps even fellow musicians.
