The Music of Nature?
The Music of NatureOur world is filled with innumerable natural sounds, and from the earliest
times humans have been intrigued and inspired by this “soundscape.”
People who live close to nature perceive a wider range of sounds than those
of us living in industrialized societies, who rely heavily on advances in
sound technology. The sounds of whales in the ocean, for example, were
first recorded in the 1940s, yet the Tlingit, Inuit, and other seafaring tribes
have been hearing them through the hulls of their boats for millennia.
Similarly, the ultralow frequency communications of elephants [HN1] have
only just been recorded even though the Hutu and Tutsi tribes of central
East Africa have incorporated these sounds into their songs and stories for
centuries.
Not all bird sounds emanate from the vocal tract--some are produced with “instruments” such as special
feather structures, others by the bird pounding on an object with a “preferred” resonance. Perhaps the most
remarkable example of a bird using an instrument to produce sound is that of the palm cockatoo
of Northern Australia and New Guinea . Each male breaks a twig from a tree, then
shapes it into a drumstick. The bird selects a hollow log with a preferred resonance and then, holding the stick
with its foot, drums on the log as part of its courtship ritual.
Ambient sound is a central component of natural habitats. Abstracting the voice of a single creature from a
habitat and trying to understand it out of context is a little like trying to comprehend an elephant by
examining only a single hair at the tip of its tail (before cloning, of course). The ambient sound of an
environment mimics a modern-day orchestra: the voice of each creature has its own frequency, amplitude,
timbre, and duration, and occupies a unique niche among the other musicians (16). This “animal orchestra” or
biophony represents a unique sound grouping for any given biome and sends a clear acoustical message.
Musical sounds form an exciting, natural conduit between members of our own species, between our species
and others, and between the arts and sciences. By looking at musical commonalities, our understanding of
music is enlarging, and by viewing musical sounds as an intuitive, nonverbal form of communication, we can
better understand our own development in a biodiverse world.