The Seven Mysteries of Life

by Guy Murchie

  Now if the song of a planet is pitched twenty octaves below man's hearing, the song of the atom is sung a complementary twenty octaves above it, leaving us musically midway between the trebles and basses of the micro- and macro-cosmic worlds. This to me is one of the most significant symmetries in nature, and we should not forget that atomic music is every bit as real as the planetary kind, in fact probably more accessible, as was charmingly demonstrated in April 1939 when my late friend Donald Hatch Andrews, professor of chemistry at Johns Hopkins University, put on a ballet for the national meeting of the American Chemical Society in Baltimore, transposing the vibration frequencies of many of the common atoms down to audible pitches, when, after trimming the overtones, ballerinas costumed to represent carbon (in black), hydrogen (in red), oxygen (blue), etc., pirouetted around on the stage. There was a water dance in which several blue girls, each flanked by two red ones, did an elaborate routine to barcarolle rhythm, wheeling around each other exactly like real H2O molecules so the audience could visualize the true rolling motion of water. Others later portrayed methane (CH4), which, if the dissonant music was less than savory, at least let no one forget that it represented marsh gas. And the finale offered a series of alcohols (CH3OH, etc.), some of which sounded to Dr. Andrews like Debussy and were, he hoped, plausibly intoxicating.

  MELODY OF LIFE

  When we perceive the world thus as melody, I feel, we mortals are about as close as we can get to understanding its abstract essence, harking what Thoreau called that "most glorious musical instrument," whose generally unheard notes, grandnotes, great-grandnotes and succeeding harmonic posterity continuously join the chorus of evolution that may never end. I try not to assume the music of my native sphere is better than the music of other worlds unknown (even though it seems far too complex to have much likelihood of being identical to theirs just by chance) - so I listen to the saw-bows of insects and crustaceans as if they were unique to the universe. I marvel at the horns of earth fashioned by the mole cricket who stridulates underground (as loud as 90 decibels at one meter's range) to serenade his mate from the lonely sky. I hear the weedy warbling of the toad and the wistful whistling of the lovestruck turtle - even the almost inaudible whisper of the courting fruit fly, whose thousands of species are sorted almost entirely by the nuance of song. Diving off a reef, I discover the teeth-clicking conversations of fish, their oboeing of blown air and their drumming with special muscles upon their tuned air bladders (as were once the ancestors of our lungs).

  Drumming is widely broadcast on land too, I note, by thumping rabbits and mice, by the wings of grouse and prairie chickens, by the fists of gorillas on their chests. ... Even leeches tap on leaves, as do termites on tunnel floors, while amorous earthworms beep faintly in their coded cadences. The ultrasonic twitter and aural "vision" of bats are well known (page 206), though not the haunting bell-like tones bats ring out while hanging at rest upside down in dark glades in the deep woods. And an old-time ship's doctor describes the shrill skirling of the humpback whale as "filled with tensions and resolutions" - all these but a meager sampling of the endless sequence of living, breathing parts of the song of Earth.

  If such voices do not individually attain the full character of music, in concert they belong to something vastly greater than themselves. And could we tune in on all of them at once, fully orchestrated as integral parts of the whole planet's symphony, we would surely hear sophisticated counterpoint, blended dissonant harmonies and all sorts of subtle sonorities just above the background pastiche of insignificant gabbing. A lot of small talk naturally has to be included in Earth's total chorus, because it comprises everything voiced by everybody from bacteria to whales.

  Birds probably produce the most sophisticated music of any class of animals and put both meaning and emotion into many of their songs, which are much more individual than we usually think, a fact suggested by one ornithologist's count of 884 different songs sung by the American song sparrow and another's recording of chord variations including a four-note chord intoned repeatedly by a woodthrush. An Englishwoman named Len Howard, the professional musician and bird lover who wrote Birds as Individuals, says she can easily recognize dozens of individual birds by their voices, even though a song may change from day to day, partly through imitation. And she can tell whether the singer is happy, dejected or perhaps struggling with something unusual on his mind. At migration time the birds in her native Sussex, in effect, tell her not only when they are ready to take off for the winter but where they are going. They can't help it, for Spain, Italy, Morocco, East Africa or whatever place else is woven right into their music.

  The English blackbird, called Amsel in German-speaking countries, sings songs that more closely resemble human compositions than does any other bird with the possible exception of the wattle-eyed flycatcher of East Africa, credited with a theme of Salome that presumably antedated Strauss. Miss Howard heard an Amsel sing a phrase from Bach one day that he may or may not have heard her playing a few weeks earlier on her violin. In any case, he had to work at it, making many attempts before he got a certain trill right. Then he began experimenting with doubling the length of the trill and adding new ones with a result Miss Howard called "flutelike" and "very lovely." Another young cock Amsel "actually composed the opening phrase of the rondo in Beethoven's violin concerto," something she cou!d categorically "vouch for his not having heard." On the other hand, who knows what Beethoven may have picked up from Amsels in his day? Music is in the air and most certainly in the world's genes, and it was curiously reminiscent of Beethoven the way this bird composed the rondo by trial and error, pertinaciously trying numerous variations before reaching final satisfaction.

  Many birds copy others or try to, even others of very different families, while it has been estimated that a catchy tune may spread across the landscape in the mating season at a fairly constant mile and a half per day. Group singing is a factor in this process of course, being a common practice among certain species. Two dozen linnets, for example, will fly purposefully into a tree, all keyed up with anticipation. When one bursts into song, the others quickly join in, some twittering, some trilling, many slurring their notes up and down until all the voices unite in a great crescendo that can be heard across the fields, attracting other flocks of feeding birds, field by field, the effect sometimes traveling miles in a few minutes.

  Other birds do antiphonal singing to maintain close communication in dense foiliage, different birds singing different notes of the same tune in responsive sequence. This has been reported of pairs of tawnybreasted wrens high in the jungled Andes of Colombia who sang their parts back and forth "like' the twanging of liquid wires," diminuen-doing then to gurgling babbles, which blended into the murmurs of a nearby brook. And there is the well-documented case of an "elegant trio" sung repeatedly by three boubou shrikes in overlapping territories on the shore of Lake Bunyoni in Uganda. The third bird was a male perched on a different branch from the first two, who may have been mates, but he inserted his note every time with professional precision.

  A pair of these small shrikes has been heard by Dr. W. H. Thorpe of Cambridge University to sing as many as seventeen different duets on the same day. They use the orthodox western diatonic scale in at least five keys and know each other's parts. When the male shrike is away, the female will sing the complete duet by herself. But hearing her sing "his" part, even from a distance, often is enough to bring him flying back to reclaim his place in what seems to be a musical as well as a sexual marriage and which, should an outsider participate, can arouse musical jealousy, although trusted friends usually are more than musically welcome.

  HUMAN HARMONICS

  I shall not invade the vast subject of human musical expression except to remind you that it has spread itself virtually everywhere on Earth from a sheep camp in lonely Australia to the streets of roaring New York. Indeed there is an unbelievable range of instruments and voices on some city streets and I vividly remember the haunting modulat
ions of Arab vendors in the markets of Fez and Aleppo a few years ago, as well as the orchestrated medley of old Canton, where each tradesman would almost continuously broadcast his own trade's traditional signature in sound: the barber twanging a spiral wire, the bookseller ringing a bell, the butcher blowing a horn, and so on - so shoppers needed only to listen for what they wished and their ears would lead the way.

  But while this sort of specialized polyphony may be expected in the exotic bazaars of the Orient, who would think to listen for anything like it among the grimy, can-whomping garbage men of New York? Yet the other day a musicologist of the Manhattoes for some reason did stop and listen and, to his surprise and delight, discovered that these burly characters not only bang their cans into the truck's grinder and do an incredible amount of clanking and thudding on the sidewalk but they also call - a call that reminded him of the whooping crane, though he later decided it is lower pitched and somehow different. What the garbage men actually call to of course is their truck, to let the driver know when to move to the next bunch of cans, but the call is very traditional and always the same: a sort of tenor "Yoh-hooo!" And the musicologist instantly recognized it to be the sol-mi interval - technically a minor third or, more descriptively, a descending minor third.

  Why, you may be wondering, should garbage men always call in a descending minor third? Why not a descending major third? Or an 'ascending fourth? Or a diminished fifth? The secret seems to be simply that those other intervals don't sound right. Surely Pythagoras would know what I mean. So would Beethoven, whose Fourth and Eighth Symphonies both begin on descending minor thirds. As does Mozart's Sonata in G Major for Violin and Piano, the march in Wagner's Tannhauser, the first theme in Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1 and a host of other major classical works. These include of course Rubenstein's Kammenoi Ostrow which, as it begins with fifty-four consecutive descending minor thirds, stands as the garbage man's rhapsody supreme. Garbage men, you see, low as they may be on the musical totem pole, and little though they may realize it themselves, are actually, like everyone else, in tune with every atom they heave into the grinder's maw and with every star that is churned by the Milky Way. Among people who live out of town or at least in relatively quiet 'neighborhoods, many seem deceived by the apparent calmness of ordinary living. And they probably forget how drastic the world is, this world in which predation, parasitism and "wanton" extravagance are well established- for too often they attribute sudden illnesses and deaths to "infections" or "organic disorders," as if such things were rare, unaccountable disturbances on the otherwise serene sea of existence. Yet when I sit still and listen intently for a while, I can always hear a humming inside myself, often with overtones of singing that grow louder with awareness. This I take to be a natural manifestation of my body energy, perhaps residual molecular motion, the motor of organic matter engaged in the vital business of living. And to me there is no more reason to accept it as unmitigated calmness than' I would assume absolute tranquillity in a beautiful, drifting thundercloud or a gently twinkling star.

  MUSIC OF THE ATOM

  To come down to earth, a flame too has something of this deceptive calmness when in still air. Yet its volatile nature is immediately manifest when the right music gets to it, a phenomenon that, I'm told, was first noticed by physicist John Le Conte in the middle of the nineteenth century when at a concert he saw a gas light flare up every time a certain note was 'played on a cello. Since then researchers have gone on to discover that flames will actually accept and reproduce almost any kind of sound and, with the help of electricity, can be induced either to amplify or silence it. This occurs because the flames heat splits most of the gas molecules into negative electrons and positive ions, forming plasma (the stuff of stars) in the flame, and when any plasma is put into an electric field, its electrons naturally rush toward the field's positive pole and its ions toward the negative pole. But, as the ions are heavier than the electrons, there is a preponderant force toward the negative pole which bends the flame in that direction and, when this is controlled by an electric field shaped in a musical pattern, the fluctuating flame generates sound waves that exactly reproduce the music. It is a recent and quite extraordinary development and enough to make one wonder what kind of music the thousand-mile-high flares on the sun and other stars are dancing to, and what it will take to let us hear and understand them.

  Now shifting to the microcosm, I hear that music, particularly ultrasonic music in the presence of heat, has been found capable of changing the chemical structure and strength of crystals by spreading imperfections at grain boundaries in the lattice. But more fundamental and presumably long ago surmised by Pythagoras is music's penetration to the very heart of the atom in the resonance principle, the revelation of which seems more and more to be establishing the concept that the smallest and most indivisible "particles" of matter may now realistically be considered nodes of resonance, which, in a sense, are poetically, if not, scientifically, interpretable as living notes. Some physicists, I understand, are even hopeful that the dynamic school of physical research (which mostly studies what happens when such subatomic "particles" collide) and the theoretical school (which mostly tries to categorize the same "particles" relative to their presumed least common denominator, the quark) will get together in a harmony they have never known, through acceptance of something called "exotic resonance" (because it transcends quark harmonics), which now seems the most promising clue to the meaning of the complex, and seemingly ever more complex, symmetry of matter.

  THE VEGETABLE SERENADE

  The vegetable kingdom has its musical side too, though not much is known about it among western scientists, the most successful researcher being Dr. T. C. N. Singh, head of the Department of Botany at Annamalai University in southern India. Singh evidently got his inspiration from none other than the Hindu Prophet Krishna, who, according to legend, used to play his flute in the Brindaban gardens near Mysore to make the flowers bloom. Singh realized that sound waves vibrate the molecules they encounter and that, since plants are made of molecules which must be in continuous motion for metabolism to take place, the right kind of music might just somehow stimulate them to accelerate their metabolism. So he spent years experimenting with young mimosa and pepper plants, marigolds, petunias, tobacco, sugar cane, sweet potatoes, onions, garlic, rice, tapioca and other vegetables in the university gardens, first subjecting certain ones to an electric tuning fork's hum for half an hour at dawn, then playing to some on a flute, to more on a violin and singing to still others to see how their growth would be affected compared to similar plants left in silence.

  To his delight, in less than a week many of the plants that had "heard" the music, perhaps with the help of their earlike petals and leaves, began to outstrip their untreated companions and soon were growing at about twice the normal rate, particularly those that had been serenaded with high-pitched violin music and soprano voices. A few even outdid themselves, growing so fast they showed symptoms of a kind of hypersthenia and soon withered and died. But on the whole, as Singh matter-of-factly reported in 1959, "The treated seedlings were darker green, healthier, sturdier, with a more profuse root system than those derived from nurseries not excited by sound waves."

  While the implications of this discovery do not seem to have been accepted without deep skepticism, research on similar lines has spread to Europe and America, where at least a few scientists have dared the heresy long enough to ask whether corn has ears for music? And governments are getting interested, like Canada's, whose National Research Council recently financed research into music's influence on wheat seed and, in one experiment (repeated ten times so there could be no doubt about the results), found that seedlings of Rideau wheat (a winter variety) continuously exposed to 5000-cycle sound invariably exceeded the weight of control specimens by more than 250 percent and sprouted almost four times as many grain-bearing shoots. The researcher tentatively attributed this to the resonance produced by the high-pitched sound when it p
enetrated the wheat cells, which might thus conceivably store up enough energy to double their metabolism. And there is mounting evidence of genetic mutation in the fact that later generations of many of these plants repeated their musically inspired growth rates, even though only the first generation "heard" the music. Besides, due to the well-established fact that light of two different wavelengths or pitches is required in photosynthesis, which works through resonance, we can state categorically that energy in plants comes from the radiational equivalent of a musical chord. All of which fairly completes the botanical side of our thesis that life is physiologically, as well as abstractly, a melody.

  MUSICAL ESSENCE OF THE UNIVERSE

  Winding up this final chapter on meanings to be gleaned from life's music, I would like to sneak in one last point about the musical character of the world, including the common dust we're made of. I have noticed that music, like solid matter, is essentially crystalline in structure. This is not exactly a recent discovery, being one of the latter-day surmises of the ancient art-science of harmonics founded by Pythagoras, but it is something everyone needs to understand if he would make himself aware of the seams where matter and spirit meet. Even though the music of matter is far too high-pitched for the human ear to hear either the individual notes sung by each element, the chords by each chemical compound or the intricate fugues reverberating from each type of crystal, matter's latticed waves are nevertheless spaced at intervals corresponding to the frets on a guitar or the holes in a flute, with analogous sequences of overtones arising from each fundamental tone. And, as Professor G. C. Amstutz, director of the Mineralogical and Petrographic Institute of the University of Heidelberg, said recently, "The science of harmony in music is, in these terms, practically identical with the science of symmetry in crystals. Indeed the crystals can now literally be seen to be the philosopher's stone, frozen music which presents to the eye ... the dynamism of the molecules, atoms, particles and standing waves of which they are composed ..."