110 / / JANUARY 2017
hen composer Emily Doolittle was given
the chance to spend time at the Max Planck
Institute for Ornithology in Germany, the
birds she heard became her inspiration. She
wove together the sounds of partridges, geese and wrens
in a piece she titled Seven Duos for Birds or Strings, first
performed in 2014. ‘Many birds use similar timbres, pitch
relationships and patterns to human music,’ she says. ‘I think
there is lots of room for musicians and scientists to work
together to better understand animal songs.’
Like Doolittle, researchers around the world are
increasingly exploring links between birdsong and human
sounds. We may be far apart on the evolutionary tree
(scientists estimate the last common ancestor of birds and
mammals may have lived more than 300 million years ago),
but humans nevertheless happen to have a lot in common
with birds when it comes to making themselves heard.
The musician wren, for example, which features in
Doolittle’s work, is native to the Amazon and has inspired
music across South America. As Doolittle found, the wren
sings using the same intervals found frequently in human
music – octaves, perfect fifths and perfect fourths.Meaning behind the music
But do beautiful birdsong and chirping calls contain more
than melody? Is there a deeper complexity that affects the
meaning? Toshitaka Suzuki and his colleagues at The Graduate
University for Advanced Studies in Japan certainly think so.
They’ve found that Japanese tits can arrange the calls they
make in order, like words in a sentence, with the arrangement
of calls changing the overall meaning – a system known as
syntax. The rules of syntax in human language relate to the
structure of a sentence, and the order in which we say words.
It’s why we would say ‘I’m going to the shops,’
rather than ‘the shops to I’m going,’ for
example.
‘Tits are known for having these very
complicated call systems – a lot of the calls in
the Japanese tit repertoire have meanings,’
explains David Wheatcroft at Uppsala
University in Sweden, who also worked
on the Japanese study. One call refers to
predatory snakes, for instance, and another
to the danger of hawks overhead. Parents
also have different calls for their chicks,
telling them to flee or duck in the face of
danger. What is special about Japanese tits is
that they seem able to combine at least two
of these calls together.
The researchers learnt that there was
one particular combination that prompted
birds to scan for a predator and then also to
approach and harass it. Like human syntax,
this combination only worked if the tits’ calls
were uttered in a particular order. ‘SyntaxW
‘ Many basic features
of language capacity
are shared between
humans and birds ’
Birds use their trills and chirps
for a variety of purposes, from
mating to sounding alerts.
Clockwise from above:
singing cactus wren,
red-tailed laughing thrush,
greylag goose and great titComposer Emily Doolittle studies
the meanings of birdsong