Animal Singers

On our way up to Reno last week, I told Wayne and Murray my theory about humans singing, how we're the only apes who sing. We started thinking of all the animals that do sing: whales, birds, wolves and dogs (maybe, if you count howls), cats (again, if you count their calls), frogs, perhaps some monkeys (howler monkeys?). Part of the question is defining what singing is. My definition would be sounds, melodies, that have enough variation and length so that it's not just a single hoot or call or even sequence of such that the animal does. Rather, it's a complex, ever-changing series of pitches of varying length. Of course, as far as we know no animal combines words and music as we do--but who knows, maybe they do and we just don't know it. I've been meaning to look up Native American singing--I can't tell if they're singing words or just making sounds. If indeed they are words, than that would be an argument in favor of saying we can't tell if certain animals speak language, since we have enough trouble telling when certain tribes of humans speak another language.

But back to animal singing. I just found an article on this topic: "Music without Borders," Science News Online, April 2000! Apparently, a pianist in Greensboro, N.C. named Patricia Gray, with the National Musical Arts program, has formed a BioMusic Project with a dozen scientists and musicians to explore the "musical sounds of all species."

Turns out I was right about apes--only a few primates are considered singers:

"Although primates are closer to Pavarotti than a whale is, they aren't particularly musical, notes Thomas Geissmann of the Institute of Zoology in Hannover, Germany. In his work on evolution, he accepts as a song a string of notes, usually of more than one type, that form a recognizable pattern in time. Some 26, or 11 percent, of primate species sing by this definition, he reports in The Origins of Music (2000, N.L. Wallin et al., eds., MIT Press). The chanteurs include some of the indris, tarsiers, titis, and gibbons. The behavior seems to have evolved independently four times within primates, he says."

As I thought, whales also sing, with repetition and rhyme, over seven octaves! But really, birds are the closest to us in this respect. Apparently, Mozart had a pet starling, a bird that passes musical traditions from generation to generation and is also a talented mimic:

"One of his notebooks records a passage from the last movement of the Piano Concerto in G Major and the same passage as the starling revised it. The bird imitated it closely but changed the sharps to flats. 'Das war schön'—That was beautiful!,— reads the comment in Mozart's hand.

When the starling died, Mozart held graveside ceremonies, singing hymns and reciting a poem he'd written for the fallen songster. Baptista agrees with two other ornithologists who have argued that Mozart's next composition, an odd sextet for strings and two horns, known as 'A Musical Joke,' shows starling style. Mozart wrote it only 8 days after the death of his bird, and it includes such starling-like bits as intertwined tunes, off-key recapitulations, and an abrupt ending."

Another cool fact: Starlings have a two-part voice organ and can sing two songs simultaneously! Among human singers, only Bobby McFerrin has mastered that trick (and only by faking it, of course, switching quickly between a bass line and a melody line.)