Araya-Salas’s conclusion gave me pause. Documented musical properties in birds might be caused by cultural biases of the listener or misunderstanding of the physics of musical compositions. In other words: If you think birdsong is music, it is your own sad little misunderstanding. The study is an interesting one with much food for thought, but the conclusions drastically overreach. The paper tells us that the song of one passerine species does not display harmonicity. That’s one bird out of about four thousand species, each with a unique song. And the measure was just a tiny sample of Western musical scales—there are many other scales and harmonic forms people consider music, both in the West and across the globe. And the conclusion that this particular bird’s song is not strictly analogous to a few particular Western musical scales? Well, we already knew that. But does that mean it’s not music in some form or that it is not musical?*
David Rothenberg is an academic philosopher, a musician, and a studied amateur ornithologist. In his wonderful book Why Birds Sing, he cautions us against failing to distinguish between what birdsong is for and what birdsong is. We know the ornithological explanations for the function of birdsong: the creation and defense of a territory, the declaration of sexual maturity, the attracting and securing of a mate. This is what birdsong is for. But as for what birdsong is? “Music,” Rothenberg declares. In my college-level ornithology text, authors Joel Welty and Luis Baptista listed the usual reproductive, social, and individual functions of birdsong but added that they could not rule out the possibility that birds sing “from a sense of well-being” or simply “for the joy of it.” And it was the philosopher Charles Hartshorne who added to the list of ornithological functions of birdsong “bliss.”
The longer I ponder, the more I come to realize that the question of whether birdsong is strictly music, while a good question, is not my question. Determining a clear statement of the proper relationship between birdsong and music might have value for scientists and musicologists; in a strict academic setting bound by lexiconic definitions of words like music and harmony, the discussion gains a kind of interest and worth. This way of knowing has inherent beauty, and I do not mean to disparage it. But in this moment? With a Mozart quartet playing softly on the stereo as I write, and a tiny, round orange-crowned warbler in the tree outside my study window lending his trill to the top of the allegro movement? I close my eyes and hear them both entering my ears, and I cannot tease them completely apart. It would feel frugal and tightfisted to suggest that one is music and the other is not. And in such matters, I do not want to feel tightfisted. I want to feel profligate.
It is another day at the forested park near my home, and well into the summer. I am sitting in the grass, leaning against the thick trunk of a Douglas fir, and staring up into the branches of a thick and knotted old bigleaf maple. My mossy seat is not in a well-kept or frequently trodden area of the park. I was drawn by the raucous cawing of two juvenile ravens and wandered over for a look. Ravens are not common here, and this is the first time in some years that they have successfully nested in the park. Three young hatched, but one of these was killed while it was still floppy and small, most likely by an off-leash dog.
I am being eaten alive by biting flies, but I stay where I am because one of the young birds has flown from the tangled woods and into the tree right next to me, from where she calls to her sibling. Craaaww, craaawww! So loud! This young bird is perfecting the scream with an underlying low croak that characterizes the vocalizations of her species, already distinguishable from any other bird. But in spite of the ruckus she is making, the little raven appears calm. Quiet in spirit, loud in voice. She looks down at me, unfazed, as naive young birds are. She fluffs her wings, calls again. It is good to be in her company. In my notebook, I sketch the tree, sketch the bird. I squint at my drawing, and even then it is not good. I close my eyes and listen.
Crow. Red-breasted nuthatch. The chirring of starlings in a nearby nest, the tapping of a downy woodpecker. Robins. The spiral song of the Swainson’s thrush. Human children. Traffic. A motorcycle. The low of a ferry coming in to dock. Bushtits, chickadees. Olive-sided flycatcher. A bird whose voice I do not know (which makes me vaguely uncomfortable). A rustle on the ground in the tangle of ferns and huckleberry and nootka rose. A mouse? A Pacific wren? At this urban/woodland park it is just as likely to be a rat. A woman calls to her child, “Gaabbbyyyy!”—the only sound louder than the ravens. Spotted towhee. More crows, mad ones (they don’t like the ravens, but there may also be a sharp-shinned hawk nearby). I keep my eyes closed as all the sounds soften, yet heighten and blend. I visualize them surrounding me, a map-blanket of resonance all around me. But now there is a scritch right next to my ear, so startling that I cheat and peek. A brown creeper hanging on the tree bark! I can hardly keep calm. The creeper pays me no mind in my stillness and the tiny scrape of creeper toenail in my ears is as loud as a truck. I want to squeal, but I close my eyes back down, farther down. I calm my excited creeper nerves. There is my breathing and, can I hear it? Yes, there is my heartbeat.
When I finally open my eyes, I am Rip Van Winkle, unsure of how much time has passed. All the sound is still here, still everywhere. And the raven is still above me. “Hi,” I whisper. But her eyes, now, are lightly closed. Perhaps she too hears her own heartbeat, faster than mine. Surely she does. But here is her sibling raven flapping in the branches. Clumsy and new, he flies to another tree, perhaps a hundred yards away, and craawws loudly. This is too far; the siblings want to be close. My raven looks up, shakes off her own young silence, screams, and flies in the direction of her brother. There is a movement of grass, of bodies. The sounds continue, all of them and more. They rise, fall, become almost silent, rise again. “Is this it?” I wonder out loud—why not? The rest of the earth seems to be wondering aloud. Am I wrong to think that this is the music of the spheres?*
When we use this phrase colloquially, we refer to a poetic sensibility or a philosophic notion. To “hear the music of the spheres” is to feel in harmony with life, with self. We have seen something of incomparable beauty or achieved a state of bliss through meditation or yoga or mountain climbing. We find ourselves ridiculously alive after a horrific accident, or we have fallen suddenly in love. Somehow, the world itself is singing to us, and we are listening in a rarefied way.
Our ancestors were more attuned to the movements of the heavens than most of us are today. This was partly because the night skies were more visible due to the absence of bright lights, but people who depended on gathering, hunting, and small-scale farming for survival also relied on the movements of the stars to locate themselves in time, in seasons, in the cycles of planting and harvesting. In Egypt, the appearance of shining Sirius presaged the annual flooding of the Nile. The regular movements of the stars above were reassuring and gave some sense of rhythm and predictability in a time that was plagued by a harsh awareness of the ephemerality of life. Against the predictability of the stars, though, lay the discomfiting wandering of the planets (the word itself is from the Greek planetes, “wanderers”). If the stars had meaning in relation to earthly cycles and events, as they clearly did, then the planets must have messages as well. But these messages were incomprehensible, impossible to read (when an elite priesthood claimed that they could decipher the messages of the planets, they became the first astrologers). Humans’ pursuit of meaning in the planets likely began two hundred thousand years ago or more.
We can only wonder over the speculations of the early sky watchers. But by the time Pythagoras was born, in 570 BC, on the Greek island of Samos, there was in place a strong human desire to find a fundamental regularity to the bafflingly complex planetary movements. Pythagoras himself is a shadowy figure, a kind of cipher about whom little is known, and yet somehow the history of geometry has come to be written on his thin biography. It is possible that even his eponymous theorem might have been outlined centuries earlier by mathematicians in Egypt, India, or Babylonia. But we do know with certainty that Pythagoras and h
is followers sought links between numbers, geometry, and the structure of the natural world, believing that all of these were interconnected and that the connections themselves had not just mathematical but also ethical and spiritual significance.
In their search for mathematical and earthly harmony, the Pythagoreans explored music and musical instruments. They recognized that when you pluck two strings, one twice the length of the other, a perfect octave is produced. Exploring further, they found that strings with a length ratio of two to three produce an interval called a fifth, which is pleasing to the human ear; Western music was largely developed around such intervals (the violin has four strings, each a fifth apart). Though the Pythagoreans did not possess the mathematics or the astronomical knowledge to posit anything but the vaguest of theories, their melodic explorations led them to propose a “music of the spheres,” a harmonious relationship that linked the planets one to another in just the way strings arranged on a violin produce notes that vibrate in harmony.
The idea of a universal harmony founded in sound is not unique to Western mathematics. In Hinduism there is the notion of shabad, which is sometimes interpreted as an audible life stream. Humans can enter this current through the chanting of the universal syllable om, which activates the energy centers in the human body and promotes physical and spiritual resonance with the wider universe. And in the Gospel according to John, 1:1, it is written, “In the beginning was the Word,” which many scholars claim would be more accurately translated as “In the beginning was the Sound.” Not a primordial soup, but a primordial hum.
Two thousand years after Pythagoras, the German mathematician Johannes Kepler, an advocate of Copernicus’s new heliocentric theories, followed up on the notion. Kepler sought to understand the sacred architecture of the solar system and to find mathematical harmony in the way that planets are placed in space. After a series of misguided propositions, Kepler eventually became the first known mathematician to accurately describe planetary orbits. He formulated the principle now referred to as Kepler’s first law of planetary motion, which states that orbits are not circular, as was initially presumed, but elliptical; and later his second law, which established that the spread of the ellipse increases the farther a planet is from the sun. With these laws, Kepler gave us a roundabout pathway back to Pythagoras and a planetary orchestra.
Pythagoras based his inquiries into harmony on musical notes, but as any string player knows, no note that is actually performed is mathematically pure—every note played on an instrument is influenced by other notes, the subtle vibrations of the other strings, and even nearby instruments (when my daughter plays a D on her cello, the D string on my violin a few feet away hums, even though no one is touching it). These are musical overtones, and they create the complexity we look for in a good musical instrument. Geophysicist David Waltham elucidates this concept in his book Lucky Planet. The overtones, he stresses, are what make instruments unique. If a pure sound were possible, then all instruments would sound very much alike, and the orchestra pit would be dull indeed. Instead, overtones allow for the unique sounds of a violin versus a piano versus a French horn, creating a world of interaction between material substance, space, and sound.
The simplification might torture a cosmologist, but there is an analogy in the movement of the planets. The orbit of each planet in our solar system has a characteristic wobbling, a tilt that, as it oscillates, interacts with the oscillations of the other planets’ tilted, slightly wobbly, ever so slowly changing orbits. The resulting vibrations are the planetary overtones, and when they mingle, they create a complex hum, the background music of our universe, our planet, our lives. Simple, perfectly parallel spherical orbits would not allow the friction that could create such a sound, so Kepler really was on the path that led to our modern understanding of the music of the spheres.
This planetary hum is fifty octaves below the hearing range of humans, but scientists have modeled the orbital oscillations and raised the frequency to human range that they can play back for us. The sound is a kind of chaotic scream that, as it goes on, lowers in pitch and increases in volume, as would be expected of expanding elliptical orbits. (Waltham again suggests musical instruments by way of analogy: A cello is lower and louder than a violin of the same shape.) The sound, writes Waltham, must be more like the familiar chaos of an orchestra tuning up—not wholly unpleasant, but still discordant and unpredictable—than of the orchestra coming together to perform a concerto. More like a gull, he says, than a nightingale. Or perhaps, I cannot help thinking, like the whistle of a starling.
And overlaid upon this music of the spheres, this present-but-unhearable starling-esque hum? There is the music that we hear, and make, daily. There is the music of Bach, of Messiaen, of Mozart. Of the woodland wren, the woodpecker’s drum. The laughter of an infant, the drag of an old woman’s cane against the sidewalk. David Rothenberg wrote: “Species are supposed to sing only for their own kind, but the more I listen, the less I’m sure. Yesterday I heard all the thrushes singing together in the laurel woods: veeries, hermits, wood thrushes. They all seemed to be getting at one total song.” I recognize this as the song from my woodland meditation. Human and natural music both make mischief with our ingrained patterns of separateness.
Years ago, I heard the late Zen Buddhist teacher Robert Aitken give a reading at Elliott Bay Book Company, Seattle’s famed indie shop. After, those who had gathered for the talk walked out the doors and into a warm late-summer evening. Aitken Roshi had ended with a short meditation; our minds were hushed and open. It seemed sudden when someone pointed and called out, “Look at the birds!” There in the urban sky was a cloud of starlings, thousands of starlings, swirling in one of their great, mesmerizing orbs. “It’s a sign,” someone whispered.
And it was a sign. Autumn was coming. In the spring and summer, starlings divide into couples and then family groups in the business of mating and nesting. But in the late summer, this exclusivity breaks down, and starlings begin to gather into the groups that will grow into their huge fall and winter flocks. Flocking has many benefits—through force of numbers, birds find and share food, roosts, and warmth, and, in flight, they foil aerial predators. When a hawk sees a solitary bird, it can focus on that bird as prey with efficient single-mindedness. But a flock becomes an organism in itself, making it difficult for a predator to zero in on an individual bird.
Starlings seem to take the evolutionary mechanism of flocking into the realm of high art when they gather in hundreds, thousands, sometimes even a million birds and turn about the sky in mysterious, graceful, spellbinding dance-clouds called murmurations. These are evasive maneuvers, complicated enough to beguile even a peregrine falcon, the most formidable of aerial predators. But they bewitch the human mind as well. As we watch them converge into great spheres, then swirl into funnels and ellipses, starling murmurations lift us into an elated, almost hypnotic state.
Murmuration. (Photograph by Donald Macauley)
Some ornithologists claim that starling flocks were originally named murmurations because of the varied songs and sounds that starlings create. But starlings do not call out much during their flock-dances, and I am more inclined to agree with other avian etymologists who believe that the name comes from the whisper of wings, so many wings, together in flight. Beneath a murmuration, I feel that I am kneeling in an ancient cathedral that ought to be silent but instead whispers overhead with the gathered prayers of hundreds of years of pilgrims. But here is a much greater cathedral—the entire sky—and the prayers are the light brushings of feathers.
For centuries, humans have looked up at these murmuring flock-prayers and asked, “How?” How do they spin and change and rise and gather and spread, all of them, at exactly the same time? With so many birds in the air, it is imperative that everyone keeps going the same direction—if even a single bird goes its own way, there will be aerial crashes and broken wings. Yet there has never been a satisfactory explanation for the phenomenon. Perhaps there w
as a lead bird that all of the rest watched and followed? But sometimes the flocks spread the length of several city blocks—there was no way that the bird at one end could see the bird at the other. Maybe the leader gave a vocal signal, unhearable to us on the ground? Maybe they were involved in a Rupert Sheldrake-ian group mind, a kind of morphic resonance? Maybe so. The explanation for such preternatural coordination seemed to transcend traditional biology. And now that the technology has caught up enough to give researchers the ability to look carefully at murmurations through high-powered video, high-resolution slow motion, and computational modeling, this seems to be true—starling flocks do fly beyond the parameters of biology and into the realm of cutting-edge physics.
In 2010, University of Rome theoretical physicist Giorgio Parisi published a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Parisi and his team found that starling murmurations function in the same way as various natural systems on the cusp of a shift, described by scientists as “critical transitions.” These are systems that are poised to tip into a sheer transformation, like metals becoming magnetized, liquids turning to gas, or gathered snow in the moment before an avalanche. In such transitional moments, the movement or velocity of one particle affects all the others, no matter how many others there are, in what is called a “scale-free correlation.” In terms of starling murmurations, the change in velocity or movement of one starling would affect all the rest, whether there were fifty others, or fifty thousand. But if every bird is busy paying attention to all the others, how does one individual launch a change in the whole? And how does that whole respond so quickly?
The answers remain murky, but a couple of years after their initial paper, Parisi’s team took their research further, paying attention to the correlation of each individual to the birds closest to it. It turns out that the change in the movement of one bird will affect the seven birds closest to it. Those seven birds will each affect seven more birds, and their movements will ripple, scaling rapidly, through the flock. How it happens so incredibly fast is still a mystery and the subject of ongoing research, but it is postulated that these moments of transition in starling movements may mirror universal principles at work in the proteins and neurons that underlie the makeup and movement of all creatures. Thus, starling murmurations might be the most visible and also the most winsome iteration of biophysical criticality, a mirror into deeper, unseen, all-embracing secrets of life that have yet to be understood. Watching them, I feel that mystery viscerally; I feel my head swirl and my body sway. I always thought this was because the movements of murmurations are so graceful, and surely that is part of it. But it may also arise from an unconscious identification with the same movements at work within the neurons of my own brain and neural synapses. Deep calling unto deep, as the psalmist sang.
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