Evidentia

Emily Doolittle

I met Emily Doolittle, a composer with a doctorate in music from Princeton University, while doing a documentary series for CBC Radio, called The Secret Voice of Nature.

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GT: When did you first get interested in the music of birds?

Emily Doolittle: I wrote “Night Blackbird Song” in 1999 when I was living in Amsterdam. When I first moved there, I woke up in the middle of the night, to hear a European blackbird – Turdulus merula – singing outside my window. And because I was in a new place and keenly aware of what was around me, I threw open the window and listened for a long time, and I was really fascinated by comparing what the bird was singing to what I am used to in human music…. I found that a lot of the small motives that it sang were very much like what humans use in music – small scalar passages and arpeggios and things like that. The way the blackbird strung the motives together was very unlike what I am used to humans doing in music. So I thought about this for a long time, and I ended up exploring it through a composition of my own – Night Blackbird Song…. I made up a whole collection of motives. I listened to the blackbird by my house, and there was a blackbird by a friend’s house and I listened to that, so I collected some actual blackbird motives, and I made up some motives that sounded like they could be blackbird motives. Then, in the piece, I start out by arranging the motives as I imagine a blackbird would – lots of repetition, jumping from one motive to the other without any connecting melodic or harmonic material … sounds followed by silence in a pattern that doesn’t necessarily make sense to humans. Gradually through the course of the piece I transformed the motives into something that is more the way I am used to humans arranging music. It is more patterned, there is more transition between motives, things are more connected….

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This lovely blackbird song was recorded in Germany by reinsamba. The recording is covered by a Creative Common license, and can be downloaded from www.freesound.org

European blackbird (Turdus merula)

GT: Do you think your own training as a musician helped you put together what that blackbird was singing back in Amsterdam?

Emily Doolittle: Yes, I guess in a way, although classical music would not generally be open to it, or a lot of classical musicians would not be open to the idea that animals are making some sort of music. I remember, about fifteen years ago, talking to a conductor about animal songs – bird songs – and whether they might be music or not. He was saying “It sounds like music, but really it is just a mating call, so it can’t be music – it’s just a territorial call, or something like that. It can’t be music at all.” I always wondered about that. Now if you get a standard conservatory training, that training will not lead you to believe that birdsong is something musical.

GT: Aren’t human love ballads a form of mating call?

Emily Doolittle: In this culture, we have a tendency to think of animal songs as something purely functional and biological, and of human music as something purely aesthetic and creative and beautiful. I think that if we actually look at what is going on in animal songs and human songs, we find that animal songs are not all explained by functionality, and that lots of human songs do have some functional purpose. For example, think of love songs, and sexy rock stars, and national anthems, team songs – all things that could, just as much as animal songs, be about mating or territoriality.

GT: Are there some species that seem more creative to you than others?

Thai Elephant Orchestra

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This audio clip of the Thai Elephant Orchestra is from a YouTube clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23ASZtKfEAc&feature=related

Emily Doolittle: Definitely there are some species that are more musical than others. For me, part of something being musical would mean there is some sort of learned element, and some sort of choice. There are birds which don’t learn their songs. They have instinctive songs. Or birds which never vary their songs. I would to think of those as not very musical, or at least not as musical as a species in which birds learn their songs as young birds and constantly reshape them and gather new material and bringing it together in different ways…. Of the animals that make sounds that I would consider music or possibly music, by far the majority of them are birds. However, there are also some mammals that have songs that seem to me very musical. Among the animals that definitely make musical sounds would be whales and dolphins, possibly bats – bats sing ultra-high-frequency songs which are learned and quite variable. Then there are  some animals that are not really known to make music in the wild, but do things very much like music in captivity, and one of these is elephants. In Thailand, for instance, there’s one ensemble of elephants called the Thai Elephant Orchestra, and it arose because elephants used to be used for logging in Thailand, and when the logging industry dried up, there were all these unemployed elephants with no means of earning money for them to be kept. As a result, some people who were interested in helping the elephants came up with other ideas for ways to earn money for the elephants. In the past, people have done various things with elephant paintings and selling the paintings…. These people – David Soldier, the composer, is one of them – had the idea of building large musical instruments for the elephants to play, and see whether the elephants would be interested in doing that. They found the elephants were very interested in playing the instruments. They actually approached the instruments in the same way humans would have approached the instruments. The instruments were very large xylophone type instruments, and the elephants would try out one note for a long time, then add another note, and explore both notes, they would add things one at a time, rather than trying everything all at once, and they found that elephants ended up developing favourite instruments and favourite passages that they would play. Apparently some of the xylophones were built in the Thai musical scale, but there was one extra note. And the elephants would not worry about playing the extra note – they would play the notes in the Thai scale. So that suggests they recognized a correspondence between the instrument they were playing and the music they had heard. There have been other experiments with elephants which show they have really good recognition of melodies, not just immediate, but they remember them over years. Indeed, they are sensitive to pitches, whether they are transposed or not…. In the last ten or twenty years, elephants have been discovered to communicate with infrasonic sounds – these are too low for people to hear – so although elephants haven’t been known to make music in the wild, it’s also possible that they are doing things that we just don’t know about. Elephants are known to imitate other elephants, and sounds in the environment, and that’s often something that goes along with music-making.

GT: Are you also interested in the song of humpback whales?

Emily Doolittle: Yes, humpback whales are the best known whale singers. The way they put together their songs is remarkable – very much like human composers might put together their songs. There’s gradual, constant change in humpback whales songs and processes they actually go through to be transformed.

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A humpback whale

Emily Doolittle: Humpback whales are very interesting. In each ocean basin, all the humpback whales will be singing the same song. But that song will actually be gradually changing. The song is made up of five to nine different themes, and each of these themes must always be sung in the same order. So if the themes are A, B, C, D and E, the whale A, BBBBBBB, C, EEE, but it could never sing A, C, B, D, E. Then within these songs, the themes are actually transforming in set patterns. In a typical theme, the whale would sing in a glissando, going upwards, and some of the pitches in between would be taken out, so it’s like a scalar passage going up. In due course, maybe some more notes would be taken out, and it will sound more like an arpeggio going upwards, and then eventually it might just be the note at the beginning and at the end, and then the whale would go on to change it by repeating the beginning note and the end note. Eventually the sequence would transform into a whole new theme. So if you heard this song a few years later, you might not recognize what had become of the theme, but if you listened to all the songs in between, you could see how it transformed.

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For more information about Emily Doolittle and blackbirds, check out:
www.emilydoolittle.com
http://silvertone.princeton.edu/~emily/musicfiles/nightbird.mp3

For further reading:
“Progressive changes in the songs of humpback whales (Megaptera
novaeangliae): a detailed analysis of two seasons in Hawaii” by
K.B.Payne, P. Tyack and R.S. Payne in Communication and Behavior of
Whales. Westview Press (1983)

Humpback mother and calf off Hawaii