Bird intonation?

Hello Tuning,

I have been curious for some time what intervals birds sing and what type of intonation they use. I have heard fourths and major and minor thirds.
They do sing many glissandos which probably are hard to analyze, but they sing discrete melodies too. Any research on this?

Also I've heard pop science reports of whales singing diatonic phrases. Is there any truth to that, and what intonation do they use if so?

Magnus

Cornell university i think is the place that has done the most research outside of the empirical investigations of Olivier Messiaen.
It isn't whole number ratios or EDOs and often not even simple a single pitch but a band width. Often i have had a hard time resolving the difference between what spectographs tell us and what we hear.

I got quite a bit out of this (actually still taking much of it in) in regard to the "forms" bird use. not so far from humans in many ways

Music, Myth and Nature, or The Dolphins of Arion (Contemporary Music
Studies)

published 1993 by Routledge
binding Hardcover
isbn 3718653214 (isbn13: 9783718653218)
pages 250
description

Fran�ois Bernard-M�che here uses music-related myths and ancient as well as more recent history to show the underlying relationship between musical thought and certain natural laws. Using original analytical techniques, he sheds new light on the history of music, showing the presence of music in the animal world to demonstrate that Nature and culture are not in opposition.
Born in 1935, M�che has made a name for himself as a composer and musicologist. A student at the Ecole Normale Sup�rieure, a qualified teacher and a doctor of letters, he studied under Messiaen and has veen a member of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales since its foundation in 1958.

/^_,',',',_ //^ /Kraig Grady_ ^_,',',',_
_'''''''_ ^North/Western Hemisphere: North American Embassy of Anaphoria Island <http://anaphoria.com/>

_'''''''_ ^South/Eastern Hemisphere:
Austronesian Outpost of Anaphoria <http://anaphoriasouth.blogspot.com/>

',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',

Magnus Jonsson wrote:
>
> Hello Tuning,
>
> I have been curious for some time what intervals birds sing and what type
> of intonation they use. I have heard fourths and major and minor thirds.
> They do sing many glissandos which probably are hard to analyze, but they
> sing discrete melodies too. Any research on this?
>
> Also I've heard pop science reports of whales singing diatonic > phrases. Is
> there any truth to that, and what intonation do they use if so?
>
> Magnus
>
>

--- In tuning@yahoogroups.com, Kraig Grady <kraiggrady@...> wrote:
>
> Cornell university i think is the place that has done the
> most research outside of the empirical investigations of
> Olivier Messiaen. It isn't whole number ratios or EDOs and
> often not even simple a single pitch but a band width.

My (limited) understanding is that many (most?) species listen
to FM and/or AM in the timbres more than the pitches, but I
have heard (and even accidentally recorded) some birdsong that
was seemingly melodic so some species evidently do hear as we
do also.

Lots of people study birdsong, including a good friend of
mine at the University of Chicago (loosely speaking, he
studies the correlation between the activity of neurons in
brain and the songs, in starlings).

I've never heard about diatonic whalesong, and would be
very interested to see anything about that (you might say
that I'm very skeptical until then).

-Carl

> Lots of people study birdsong, including a good friend of
> mine at the University of Chicago (loosely speaking, he
> studies the correlation between the activity of neurons in
> brain and the songs, in starlings).

http://meliza.org/research/

-Carl

Mache argues in his book that birds as well as other animals sing and make sound beyond what is necessary to such functional things as location, identification, mating etc He believes that they, like humans do it also for sonic enjoyment and that we underestimate the possibility of pure animal music.

/^_,',',',_ //^ /Kraig Grady_ ^_,',',',_
_'''''''_ ^North/Western Hemisphere: North American Embassy of Anaphoria Island <http://anaphoria.com/>

_'''''''_ ^South/Eastern Hemisphere:
Austronesian Outpost of Anaphoria <http://anaphoriasouth.blogspot.com/>

',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',',

Carl Lumma wrote:
>
> > Lots of people study birdsong, including a good friend of
> > mine at the University of Chicago (loosely speaking, he
> > studies the correlation between the activity of neurons in
> > brain and the songs, in starlings).
>
> http://meliza.org/research/ <http://meliza.org/research/>
>
> -Carl
>
>

Magnus Jonsson wrote:
> Hello Tuning,
> > I have been curious for some time what intervals birds sing and what type > of intonation they use. I have heard fourths and major and minor thirds.
> They do sing many glissandos which probably are hard to analyze, but they > sing discrete melodies too. Any research on this?

You can probably find almost any interval in bird songs somewhere. This page has an example of a Black-capped Chickadee singing a major second, but other recordings have a variety of seconds and thirds.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black-capped_Chickadee

The song of the Cassin's Sparrow has some really large intervals (which can reach over an octave).

http://mirror-pole.com/collpage/casseins/cas_fft.htm

The Musician Wren, from South America, sings a variety of clear whistled songs with all sorts of intervals between the notes, including what sounds like microtonal intervals.

http://www.xeno-canto.org/browse.php?query=musician+wren

Hi all

I have an article in farsi about analysis of sound of "Agelaius
phoeniceus <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red-winged_Blackbird> " with
TF32 <http://userpages.chorus.net/cspeech/> .

TF32 is the time-frequency analysis software program for 32-bit Windows
(95/98/NT/2000/XP) for the analysis of speech and other audio-frequency
waveforms. TF32 supercedes CSpeechSP for DOS.

I founded 3 intervals approximated in 96-EDO as :

1- Basic tone(the lowest pitch in my sample)

2-An interval of 475 cent changing to 512.5 cent

3-An interval of 1062.5 cent changing to 1075 cent

you can see a spectrogarm of this bird's sound here :
http://www.harmonytalk.com/id/1274

and you can hear the sound of bird and its synthesized sample here :
http://www.harmonytalk.com/music/s2/Agelaiusphoeniceus2.mp3

and you can hear a small thing based on these intervals here:
http://www.harmonytalk.com/music/s2/bird-.mp3

Shaahin mohajeri , Tombak player and microtonalist

My web site <http://240edo.googlepages.com/>

My farsi page in harmonytalk <http://www.harmonytalk.com/mohajeri>

Irandrumz ensemble

*********

www.kayson-ir.com <http://www.kayson-ir.com/>

2288 Iranzamin bldg Iranzamin Ave.

Shahrak Qods, Tehran 14656, Iran
Telephone: (9821) 88072501-9

Fax: (9821) 88072500
Email: shahinm@kayson-ir.com <mailto:shahinm@kayson-ir.com>

P Please consider the environment before printing this mail note.

Herman wrote...

> You can probably find almost any interval in bird songs
> somewhere. This page has an example of a Black-capped Chickadee
> singing a major second, but other recordings have a variety of
> seconds and thirds.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black-capped_Chickadee

The things we would call notes sound to me like phrasing
between the chirps the bird is really listening to.

> The song of the Cassin's Sparrow has some really large
> intervals (which can reach over an octave).
>
> http://mirror-pole.com/collpage/casseins/cas_fft.htm

Ditto.

> The Musician Wren, from South America, sings a variety of
> clear whistled songs with all sorts of intervals between
> the notes, including what sounds like microtonal intervals.
>
> http://www.xeno-canto.org/browse.php?query=musician+wren

This is the only thing I've heard in this thread that to
me resembles something that could speak to human pitched
hearing.

-Carl

Carl Lumma wrote:
> Herman wrote...
> >> You can probably find almost any interval in bird songs
>> somewhere. This page has an example of a Black-capped Chickadee
>> singing a major second, but other recordings have a variety of
>> seconds and thirds.
>>
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black-capped_Chickadee
> > The things we would call notes sound to me like phrasing
> between the chirps the bird is really listening to.

The two-note song starts about 10 seconds into this sample. (The second, lower-pitched note is actually two notes slurred together if you listen closely.)

>> The song of the Cassin's Sparrow has some really large
>> intervals (which can reach over an octave).
>>
>> http://mirror-pole.com/collpage/casseins/cas_fft.htm
> > Ditto.

This song is more complex, but it does contain clear whistled notes (three at the end, before the final buzzy note). The high-pitched notes may be so high (above 8 kHz) that you lose a sense of pitch, but you can hear them more clearly if you record the sample and slow it down.