Biomusic’s “Contributions" to Science

Patricia M. Gray, Bernie Krause, Jelle Atema, Roger Payne, Carol Krumhansl and Luis Baptista jointly analyzed the music of humpback whales and many different species of birds as well as amphibians and insects. 

In “Enhanced: The Music of Nature and the Nature of Music” the authors note: “Even though they are capable of singing over a range of at least seven octaves, humpbacks use musical intervals between their notes that are similar to or the same as the intervals in our scales….  Most surprisingly, humpback songs contain repeating refrains that form rhymes. This suggests that whales use rhyme in the same way that we do: as a mnemonic device to help them remember complex material.”

With regard to birds, they write: “Advances in audio technology allowed the late Luis Baptista to draw fascinating parallels between bird song and human music. For instance, when birds compose songs they often use the same rhythmic variations, pitch relationships, permutations, and combinations of notes as human composers.” 

The Article concludes:

“It is not known when the ancient art of making music first began. But, if it is as ancient as some believe, this could explain why we find so much meaning and emotion in music even though we cannot explain why it makes us feel the way it does. Such an impenetrable vagueness about this most basic of human creations seems to signal that the roots of music lie closer to our ancient lizard brain than to our more recent reasoning cortex, that music has a more ancient origin even than human language.” 

Mark Jude Tramo, Director of Harvard University’s Institute for Music and Brain Science, devotes his article, “Enhanced: Music of the Hemispheres,” to analysis of brain structures and experimental evidence. He writes, for instance, of the demonstration of musical competence early in life: “By 4 months of age, babies prefer consonant musical intervals (major and minor thirds) to dissonant musical intervals (minor seconds). Even if an infant’s preference for consonant intervals has been influenced by 6 to 7 months of exposure to music in the womb, it is likely that the human brain enters the world primed to extract the spectral and temporal regularities that characterize popular music.”

Last year’s biomusic symposia and the concert in the National Academy of Sciences auditorium have catapulted the serious study of biomusic into the scientific mainstream, leading humans to recognize the interrelationships of other brains, other sounds and other acoustic abilities besides our own. It brings home, through the power of music, the need to preserve the planet and its magnificent biodiversity.