Birds & Music
Birds sing, but is it really like human music? That's a question that has preoccupied Dr. Emily Doolittle, a Canadian composer and musician and Assistant Professor of Composition and Theory at Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle. Working with several scientists, she analysed the song of the hermit thrush, whose call is thought to be one of the most beautiful and musical of the songbirds. She found that the bird's song frequently uses the "harmonic overtone series" - a series of frequencies related by regular mathematical ratios. These pitches are produced by many stringed and wind instruments, and are the basis of many scales in human music. The harmonic series is also produced in nature (by the whistling wind, for example), and might suggest one way in which human and animal "song" are related.
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The hermit thrush song heard at the beginning of this interview was recorded by Kevin Colver