CHAPTER 2
Musical Animals
When birds do sing, hey ding a ding, ding,
Sweet lovers love the spring.
SHAKESPEARE, As You Like It
The most important musical universal of all . . . [is] the possibility that man is a musical animal.
JOHN BLACKING, “Can Musical Universals Be Heard?”
Our body grows no wings and cannot fly,
Yet it is innate in our race
That our feelings surge in us and long
When over us, lost in the azure space
The lark trills out her glorious song.
GOETHE, Faust
THE MUSICAL ANIMAL
Aristotle characterized human beings as essentially rational animals—but suppose he had described us as musical animals instead. How would we Westerners think of ourselves? Had the musicality of humanity been taken as central, would mind/body dualism ever have been considered plausible? Would philosophers ever have argued that thought necessarily involves language?
Although Aristotle did not define the human being as musical, he had no doubts about music’s importance in human life. “Music,” he maintains, “should be studied, not for the sake of one, but of many benefits, that is to say, with a view to (1) education, (2) purgation . . . music may also serve (3) for intellectual enjoyment, for relaxation and for recreation after exertion.”1 Even if music is not central to Aristotle’s theory of human nature, he claims that we “naturally” enjoy it. “The pleasure given by music is natural,” he contends, “and therefore adapted to all ages and characters.”2
Why didn’t Aristotle define human beings as essentially musical? In his definitions he sought to differentiate the class of objects covered by the term in question from all other objects. Thus in defining the human being, he designates the conjunction of traits that characterize human beings uniquely. Music does not indicate what is unique to human beings, for other animals also enjoy music. In the Politics Aristotle advises, “Let the young practise even such music as we have prescribed, only until they are able to feel delight in noble melodies and rhythms, and not merely in that common part of music in which every slave or child and even some animals find pleasure.”3 It is not obvious what “the common part of music” is, but probably he had in mind simple rhythms and melodies, by contrast with those that are “noble” and more difficult to appreciate.
How musical are other species? Aristotle does not elaborate, but his inclusion of some animals among the musical raises the question of how universal music might be. Do the bounds of musical universality extend beyond the human species? Should we restrict our attention to humanity just because the proponents of the universal language idea do not include animals in this putative universality?
The idea of extending the universality of music to animals might seem perverse, and I do not intend to suggest that all nonhuman animals have anything akin to human music. Even for those who do, “animal music” bears some notable dissimilarities to that of human beings. The human potential to get into sync with an external beat does not appear to be shared with any other animals.4 Human beings also display a unique level of complexity in organizing musical structures—coordinating voices, developing themes, elaborating large-scale musical forms, and so on.
I have two reasons for suggesting that some animals’ sounds might be music, however. The first is that we can hear the sounds as music, and when we do, this puts into relief certain expectations we have about what music offers us. In particular, we hear music as a manifestation of vitality, and part of our enjoyment is empathy with its liveliness. Just as we recognize the life and energy of other human beings when we listen to music, we recognize kindred life and energy of birds and other creatures through the sounds they produce. The delight we take in birdsong, for example, is continuous with our pleasure in human music, for it is similarly grounded in a recognition that we are part of the same living world.
My second reason for discussing animal vocalizations here is that many people strenuously object to calling them music. The insistence that music be restricted to human beings indicates an implicit acknowledgment that music is an important characteristic of the human species and that it marks those who are kindred to us. Whether or not we consciously formulate the notion of “sounding human,” I suspect this is a regulative idea for most of us. Before getting into the arguments for and against the idea of animal music, however, I should offer an operating definition of music, since the plausibility of animal music depends in part on what music is taken to mean.
DEFINING MUSIC
What is music? The answer to this question is not straightforward. Is music essentially sound? Some philosophers deny this, arguing that sounded music is only the external embodiment of “real” music, which consists of abstract, ideal entities.5 Such musical Platonism is not a popular position, but other philosophers, too, want to emphasize that physical sound waves are not themselves music.6 Music as we understand it depends on a mind that interprets what is heard in a particular way, recognizing patterns, relating them to one another. Even if we can imagine a sound being made by a tree falling in a forest when no one is around, we cannot imagine music without a mind perceiving or imagining it. Even if we make the attempt, we ourselves are imagining the unperceived music. Music is phenomenal, existing not “objectively,” but for a mind. I will take this point for granted.
Nevertheless, I will define music in terms of sound. We formulate definitions for purposes of picking out instances that fall into a certain category, and uncontroversial cases that we would include as falling into the category music importantly involve sound, even if they also involve an interpreting mind. This holds even if the sound is only imagined; we can imagine music, but when we do, we imagine it sounding.
To return to the problem of defining music, must a definition include every instance of music and exclude every noninstance? Such precision would seem to be a desideratum for a definition. But if music is an “open concept,” as Lydia Goehr contends, it is not clear that any proposed definition will succeed in establishing the precise scope of the term.7 The open concept argument is that music, like art in general, is a concept that evolves as innovations occur, extending the scope of what the term is understood to mean. This being so, we should not expect to find a fixed definition, even for the Western music to which Goehr restricts her discussions.
I will use the term music broadly. I will roughly employ John Blacking’s characterization that music is “humanly organized sound,”8 adding, “and sounds produced by other species that we can hear as organized” because I am open to the idea that some animals’ sonic productions might warrant application of the term.9 I will use this broad definition despite the fact that this does not clearly exclude many noninstances of sound that do not seem to be music (such as sonic signals at road crossings) nor clearly include some arguable instances (the “music” that John Cage urges us to seek in environmental sound).10 I will count as “musicality” the various sensitivities and capabilities required for performance and appreciation of uncontroversial cases of music—capacities to recognize and respond to melodic shape, rhythm, timbral differences, and such. Human beings are musical insofar as such sensitivities are part of our standard operating equipment. Evidence that they are is found in the pervasive human enjoyment in sound (including language) manipulated and structured by members of our species.
The use of such a broad definition of music will undoubtedly be unsatisfactory to some.11 I think my usage is justified, given the diversity of music across history and cultures.12 John Cage’s 4′33″, a “piece” of music in which a performer sits at a piano for four minutes and thirty-three seconds, makes sense as music to at least some members of the society in which he presented it; but it is far from clear that most listeners, even in Cage’s own milieu, would accept this as music (or even a “work,” for that matter).13 And yet 4′33″ is considered noteworthy in music history.
The relativity of what people understand as music is important for my purposes, for a listener who does not recognize what is going on in another culture’s music may not acknowledge that it is music. I recall playing a tape of some percussive Nigerian music in my office one day, only to have a colleague from a nearby office come to ask me what that “noise” was. In many homes in the United States and, I assume, much of the industrialized world, parents of teenage children are annoyed by the “racket” their children choose to listen to. In these cases, music sufficiently different from what a person understands as paradigm does not sound to that person like music.
One might argue that these cases confuse honorific and classificatory definitions. The older person who hears the CDs beloved of the younger generation as something other than music implicitly defines music honorifically, insisting that the particular case does not attain a certain threshold level of merit, based on what that person counts as paradigm. What we are attempting here is a classificatory definition of music, which does not appeal to standards of merit but simply distinguishes what fits into a category and what does not, an example being the definition of a bachelor as an unmarried adult male.
Even in classificatory definitions, however, it is not always easy to keep honorific efforts at bay. A fellow philosopher once acknowledged to me that he was bemused to think that the Japanese actually enjoy the various “pings” and “boings” he hears in their music.14 He had no problem classifying it as music, but he was implicitly questioning whether such Japanese performances were music in an honorific sense.15 Less generously, the colleague mentioned earlier used the music/noise dichotomy, seemingly a distinction between classificatory categories, to assert an evaluative judgment. In principle, one might have a nonjudgmental understanding of noise and apply the term on a strictly classificatory basis. However, when is noise regarded in contrast to music not implicitly pejorative?
To recognize that a definition covers a particular case will depend on one’s perceptual habits. In a particular case of foreign music, an uninitiated listener might not recognize it as organized if it deviates too much from learned perceptual expectations. A case in point is Steven Feld’s account of Christian missionaries who reported that the Kaluli of Papua New Guinea were an extremely unmusical people, a conclusion they drew from the fact that the Kaluli seemed unable to sing in unison. Feld points out that the Kaluli ideal for singing is diametrically opposed to unison singing. The Kaluli value “layering, juxtaposing, arching, ‘lifting-up-over,’ and densifying.”16 No doubt the Kaluli wondered why the Christian missionaries were adamant about singing so unmusically. In any case, one will only hear as “musical” sound that exhibits an order one can recognize.
Slippage between classificatory and honorific definitions also occurs because the criteria used in applying one are likely to overlap significantly with those used in applying the other. One’s honorific definition of music may well use amount of consonance as a criterion, for example, but so might a classificatory definition. This example illustrates the role that musical background can play in one’s sense of the term. In fact, consonance can be defined in various ways (in terms of how an interval has been generated, whether the interval seems to call for further movement, the ratio of frequency of vibrations for the tones that compose it, and such, as well as some decision about where to draw the line between consonance and dissonance).
I suspect that implicitly normative features always infiltrate classificatory definitions to some extent, in that what one counts as paradigmatic depends on one’s experiences. The implicit normativity of seemingly descriptive definitions and concepts holds as much for my own use of categories as it does for anyone else’s. Indeed, my desire to tinker with Blacking’s definition so as to create room for animal music indicates my evaluation of some animal sonic productions and my willingness to adjust my classificatory definition accordingly. Perhaps the main value of the distinction between classificatory and honorific definitions of music is its helping to indicate points of slippage between descriptive and evaluative usage.
How useful, finally, is it to construe music as an open concept? It is useful in much the way that terms for medical conditions are. Both are meant to cover a plethora of diverse cases and are accordingly imprecise. One can, of course, stipulate certain absolute criteria for a disease or for music and refuse to count anything that fails to satisfy all of the criteria. But to follow this course is to be excessively pedantic. A seasoned doctor recognizes a disease on the basis of a general profile, even if not all the associated symptoms are observable. I urge that we use the term music, similarly, on the basis of general profile. The added complication in the musical case is that other cultures’ sonic productions may startle the uninitiated listener, presumably more than a case of flu in which a common symptom is not evident would surprise a family doctor.
The challenge one is offered by unfamiliar, foreign-sounding music is reason to use a broad definition of music. “Humanly organized sound” is a description that will cover other cultures’ sonic productions quite easily, even when they deviate significantly from one’s paradigm. I am assuming that Blacking intends his definition to capture cases in which the sound is deliberately organized, and does not intend those cases in which intentional human activities result in sonic patterns as a by-product.17 To say this, however, is not to deny that music, in many if not most cultures, plays functional roles. In my view, sound does not have to be appreciated for its own sake (or at least not exclusively for this reason) to be deliberately organized sound.18
I anticipate that some in the fields of anthropology and ethnomusicology, among others, would challenge my claim that the term music is broad enough to encompass the deliberate productions of organized sounds across the world for another reason. The notion of music, they might argue, is inherently ethnocentric, for it presupposes instances of Western music and musical practices as the standard for judgment. This is particularly the case when one takes a relatively narrow subset of Western music—such as “classical” music (understood as upper-class Western music of the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries)—as paradigm. With such a paradigm, one is more likely to acknowledge a sonic production as music the more it conforms to the expectations based on that subset. The anthropologist and ethnomusicologist would also likely object to my focusing so much on the listener’s point of view, as I noted in chapter 1.
I agree that the Western paradigm is ethnocentric, and that focus on the listener is a Western tendency. I think my focus here on listeners recognizing music in sonic signals is justified in that the ability to perceive something as musical would seem to be essential to music-making Admittedly, we should not lose sight of the fact that the predominance of music consumption over music-making in the lives of most Westerners is a departure from the practices of much of humanity. The value of a broad definition such as Blacking’s is that it accommodates a huge range of possible sound patterns and practices while acknowledging some common features among various cultures’ practices. The very existence of the field of ethnomusicology presupposes some broad conception of music that is applicable across cultural boundaries. Different cultures’ music may exhibit deep differences, but this does not render different cultures’ music completely incomparable.
ANIMAL MUSIC
Despite defending the centrality of music to human nature, I am quite content to extend the term to sounds made by whales, songbirds, and gibbons, and a variety of other animals. I am keen to do so, in fact, because to recognize continuities between human and animal sonic productions is to acknowledge biological bases for music that figure in our own species’ experience and enjoyment of music. Hence, I add to Blacking’s definition: “and sounds produced by other species that we can hear as organized.” Not only do many animals’ sonic productions resemble human music in certain respects; I think we are also able to empathize with animal music much as we identify with human music.
Music, broadly understood, is one of the specialties of our species. This claim is no more vitiated by instances of nonhuman music than the claim that the human being is the tool-making animal is undercut by examples of other mammals and birds using tools.19 Our accomplishments are exemplars for both kinds of activities. Still, I think it is reasonable to describe other animals who use tools as “toolmakers,” even if their tools are not as sophisticated as many of ours, and to call some animal sounds “music” even if there are some important differences between their “music” and ours. Perhaps the most noteworthy such difference is our recombination of meaningful sonic elements into structures from which new meanings emerge, which is not characteristic of animal vocalizations.20
I grant that animals may use music for a more limited set of functions than we do. We, after all, employ music and musical parameters to an astonishing degree in conducting our lives (as we shall consider). However, given our lack of access to the perspective of these animals, I remain agnostic about the extent to which some animals organize their experience in comparably musical ways. My purposes in making the comparison between human and animal music are to raise the possibility that musicality runs deep in our biological inheritance and to draw attention to the fact that many of us implicitly assume that musicality is a broadly human trait.
As for whether we can hear the sonic productions of some other animals as music, it seems clear to me that we often do. Classical Persian musicians take the song of the nightingale as a model for music-making. In the eighteenth century, Immanuel Kant similarly compared bird song to human music, suggesting that bird song has more freedom and therefore offers more to our taste than the singing of human beings.21 Charles Hartshorne has emphasized the beauty he finds in the singing of birds.22 Steven Feld points out that among the Kaluli, “improvised human duets with birds, cicadas, or other forest sounds are not uncommon everyday events.”23 Another people in New Guinea have a symbiotic musical relationship with the drone beetle. They put beetles in their mouths and use their bodies as resonators for the beetles’ sounds.24 Whale song has been recorded and marketed for seemingly “musical” pleasure; it has also been incorporated into human music.25 Trevor Wishart includes the whinny of a horse and a baby crying into his Vox 5.26 The howls of wolves may seem more potentially threatening than musical to many people, but I suspect that people often entertain these howls empathetically. (Presumably this is the point of the moniker “Howlin’ Wolf.”)
In fact, we often hear “music” across a larger swath of the world than the animal kingdom. We tend to associate movement with sentience, and sometimes even the sound of machine motion gives the impression of intentional behavior. We speak of humming motors. The Kaluli sing duets with inanimate natural phenomena such as waterfalls as well as animate nature.27 Composer Paul Lansky has incorporated the sounds of dishware in the kitchen, along with recognizable physiological sounds, into his music.28 Musical instruments themselves amount to inanimate materials that have been given voice.
Creationism in Music
In Western history, music was sometimes characterized as a human invention, not to contrast it with animal sounds, but as part of what might be termed the creationist debate over music. This long-standing dispute concerned the question of whether or not music was part of humanity’s original endowment from God. This issue was given impetus by the suspicion with which some religious thinkers regarded music. If God directly gave music to human beings, the reasoning went, it is above reproach. If music is a human creation, on the other hand, it may be sinful or conducive to sin.
The view that music was of divine origin had many defenders, including Clement of Alexandria in the second century; Francisco de Salinas, Gaspar Stoquerus, and Zarlino in the Renaissance; and a number of baroque thinkers.29 Many held that vocal music was given to human beings in Paradise while instrumental music was a later, human invention, of more questionable pedigree, although this differential assessment was not universal.30
The naturalistic view that human beings invented all music was defended as early as Lucretius, who described the origin of human music in the attempt to imitate chirping birds.31 The later development of scientific thought in the West also gave impetus to the naturalistic understanding of the origin of music.32 The relevant sense of naturalism did not, however, preclude interpreting music as a gift from God. Geoffrey Miller points out that natural theologians, among them William Paley, “considered birdsong to have no possible function for the animals themselves, but rather to signal the creator’s benevolence to human worshippers through miracles of beauty. . . . The idea that birdsong would be of any use to birds was quite alien before around 1800.”33
Charles Darwin’s theory of the evolution of music, like his evolutionary theory more generally, presents human beings as closer to the animals than they had previously thought. He contends that animal sounds evolved primarily for reproductive purposes. Female birds are attracted by the song of the males of their species. Similarly, human music evolved to facilitate mating. “The impassioned orator, bard, or musician, when with his varied tones and cadences he excites the strongest emotions in his hearers, little suspects that he uses the same means by which his half-human ancestors long ago aroused each other’s ardent passions, during their courtship and rivalry.”34
Animal Musicality
One might consider whether more recent efforts to dismiss the notion of animal music are motivated by an effort to reassert humanity’s claim to distinction in the face of evolutionary theory. I find rather fascinating the marked species pride vis-à-vis music that is evident in the wildly speculative remarks that some thinkers have enlisted in their cases for music’s uniquely human character. Occasionally, the purpose in denying that animals have music is to emphasize our common nature as human beings. This seems to have been Louis Armstrong’s point when he said, “All music is folk music, I ain’t never heard no horse sing a song.”35 More often, however, the aim seems to be a defense of human superiority, often by means of loaded criteria for music and musicality. For example, Graham Gordon asserts, “the cry of a bird has no melody and is in no key,” and he describes this as an “important and incontestable fact.”36
But this statement is not uncontestable. Peter J. B. Slater points out that some birds sing in near perfect scales (e.g., musician wren, Cyphorhinus aradus).”37 Darwin cites with approval a report that gibbons sing in halftones and across the range of an octave.38 He also points out that his son, Francis, “attentively listened in the Zoological Gardens to H. leuciscus whilst singing a cadence of three notes, in true musical intervals and with a clear musical tone.”
Darwin does not stop there; he reports that “certain rodents utter musical sounds.” He cites Rev. S. Lockwood reporting on the singing of an American species of mouse, the Hesperomys cognatus. Lockwood notated the mouse’s two main songs and described several of their musical characteristics, such as the use of distinct semitones. According to Lockwood, the mouse “had no ear for time, yet she would keep to the key of B (two flats) and strictly in a major key. . . . Her soft clear voice falls an octave with all the precision possible; then at the wind up, it rises again into a very quick trill on C sharp and D.”39
One common contention among those who deny music among animals is that music is a consequence of intelligent design, where intelligence is defined in such a way that animals lack it. For example, Graham Gordon insists that human intentionality is essential for sound to be music.
Natural sounds are not musical. . . . The only thing in nature which may be said to be truly musical is the human voice when it sings, and, of course, singing is itself making music, an intentional activity in which human beings uniquely engage.40
Such reasoning ignores evidence that many nonhuman species are clearly intentional in their sonic productions.41 According to Carol Whaling, songbirds must memorize their songs and then practice what they learn. The young bird’s first effort to repeat a song that has been memorized is usually imperfect, and a practice period is necessary for it to fine-tune its performance.42 Björn Merker claims that learning may be involved in chimpanzee vocalizing as well. He mentions “a report of instances in which individual chimpanzees take over the distinctive pant-hoot pattern of a fellow group member after the latter’s disappearance or death.”43
If intentionality is the criterion that makes an acoustic production music, many nonhuman sounds surely count as well, as Robin Maconie asserts. He defines music as “any acoustic activity intended to influence the behavior of others,” and he acknowledges that this is to treat “the roar of a lion, squeal of a dolphin, or chirping of a bird as the same kind of activity in principle as a concerto or symphony.”44 Such sociable intentionality is certainly displayed by vervet monkeys, who make distinct alarm calls for different kinds of predators, inciting distinct avoidance strategies in those who hear these responses.45 Male gorillas sometimes join together in vocalizing, starting and stopping independently, but joining together in chest beating at a climax.46 Chimpanzees sometimes drum on trees with their hands and feet while vocalizing.47 Darwin points out that during courtship, “the males of various birds practise . . . what may be called instrumental music.” He cites quill rattling, wing scraping, buzzing, striking wings together, using beaks to strike tree branches, quivering wings to make a whirring sound, as well as a combination of vocal and instrumental effects achieved by the male hoopoe (Upupa epops). He reports, “during the breeding season this bird, as Mr. Swinhoe observed, first draws in air, and then taps the end of its beak perpendicularly down against a stone or the trunk of a tree, ‘when the breath being forced down the tubular bill produces the correct sound.’”48 Intentionality is difficult to deny in such instances.
Another argument for restricting music to human beings is that animals lack the capacities for musical experience. Roger Scruton takes this line:
But surely, although animals may perceive the redness of a flower, the loudness of a sound, the bitterness of a leaf, they do not hear the sadness of a melody. To hear such a quality you need not only sensory capacities, but also intellect, imagination, perhaps even self-consciousness.49
Colin Radford also doubts that nonhuman animals have the mental wherewithal to respond musically. Along these lines, he claims that animals are even less musical than the least musical human beings. “There are some human beings who scarcely respond to music in any way, except perhaps to tap their feet to the simplest and most insistent of rhythms. Animals are seemingly incapable even of that.”50 This argument implicitly requires that music provoke more than a sympathetic response to regular rhythm.
If the point is to establish that nonhuman animals are unmusical, Radford is wise to be so specific in itemizing their limitations. Even Eduard Hanslick, champion of music’s intellectual appeal, acknowledged animal responses to music, albeit in a sarcastic passage. “The call of the trumpet fills the horse with courage and eagerness for battle; the fiddle inspires the bear to attempt ballet steps; the delicate spider and the ponderous elephant are set in motion by hearing the beloved sounds.”51 Hanslick’s point is that the alleged moral effects of music are nothing people should be proud of, since they occur in beasts as well. Gordon L. Shaw cites a report from a woman on the island of Islay in Scotland: seals would swim up to her boat and stick their heads out of the water when she played the violin, with more seals appearing the longer she played.52 Scientific studies have shown that dogs and rhesus monkeys are able to recognize a link between a tone and its octave.53 Many Islamic thinkers of the medieval age also reported that animals were emotionally affected by music. Al-Kindi asserts that flutes and horns delighted dolphins and whales. Al-Farabi and Ibn Sina claim that vocal music had such an impact on camels.54
I can report a number of occasions when my own dogs reacted in a marked, I would say enthusiastic, manner when I wore jingling jewelry that produced a regular rhythm as I walked, though admittedly they did not tap their feet. Although this is a mere anecdote, it suggests that Radford is wrong to claim that animals are incapable of responding to pronounced rhythms. The specific response of tapping one’s foot or deliberately marking any external rhythm does seem to be a particularly human skill, but this need not be construed as the decisive capacity involved in musical response. My dogs in fact responded to other musical features besides the regular jingling of my jewelry. The timbre of a siren would set them to howling, as would the timbre of my husband’s saxophone. Perhaps Aristotle observed similar reactions of dogs to musical instruments and rhythms. Apparently Darwin did. He reports observing a dog that was “always whining, when one note on a concertina, which was out of tune, was played.”55
Darwin contends that because noise is the result of “several aerial ‘simple vibrations’ of various periods, each of which intermits so frequently that its separate existence cannot be perceived,” only the lack of continuity and harmony among these vibrations distinguishes noise from musical tones. Accordingly, “an ear to be capable of discriminating noises—and their high importance of this power to all animals is admitted by every one—must be sensitive to musical notes.” Darwin amasses considerable evidence that nonhuman animals are responsive to musical tones.
Crustaceans are provided with auditory hairs of different lengths, which have been seen to vibrate when the proper musical notes are struck . . . similar observations have been made on the hairs of the antennae of gnats. It has been positively asserted by good observers that spiders are attracted by music. It is also well known that some dogs howl when hearing particular tones. Seals apparently appreciate music, and their fondness for it “was well known to the ancients, and is often taken advantage of by the hunters at the present day.”56
Why should we count foot tapping as a (limited) musical response but not these other reactions?
No doubt, we do have an unusual range of options in vocalizing because of the human descended larynx, which gives considerable control over the details of our vocal expression.57 But if complexity of musical structure is taken as the criterion for music, it is unclear that human beings have techniques that are completely unavailable to animals. François-Bernard Mâche indicates a wide range of techniques used in human music that also appear in some animals’ vocal productions. He points out that the musical rhythms common to a large sweep of Alexander the Great’s erstwhile empire involve “an irregular number of basic units, very often grouped by three and by two.” The same rhythmic tendencies characterize the vocalizations of some animal species, such as the red-billed hornbill and the red-legged partridge. Devices such as accelerando, crescendo, and climbing pitch are used by some species (such as the blue-headed dove and the chestnut-headed pygmy rail), and “sometimes, a song is rhythmically organized as a whole. This means that the bird may have an overview of a very long duration.”58
Mâche also denies that we are unique in using musical scales as framework, claiming that “many animals use precise and stable sets of pitches in their signals.” He goes on to cite several songbird examples, including a bird from Kenya (the scaly-breasted illadopsis [Illadopsis albipectus]) that makes variations in articulation, repeating a staccato pattern in legato. The tones in some songbirds’ music also indicate a hierarchy, and gibbons and some birds make use of transposition.
Moreover, the sonic productions of certain nonhuman creatures offer evidence of an aesthetic sense, a genuine pleasure in song as such. Peter Slater observes the role that birdsong plays in sexual selection is hardly incompatible with “aesthetics or the enjoyment of song.”59 I would go further. If female birds do select mates on the basis of musical ability, they are revealing an aesthetic preference.60 This was Darwin’s view:
That [musical tones] . . . do give pleasure of some kind to animals, we may infer from their being produced during the season of courtship by many insects, spiders, fishes, amphibians, and birds; for unless females were able to appreciate such sounds and were excited or charmed by them, the persevering efforts of the males, and the complex structures often possessed by them alone, would be useless; and this is impossible to believe.61
One could, perhaps, argue against animal music that animal music is merely functional, while human music is appreciated aesthetically, for itself. This argument is a nonstarter, however. In the first place, it supposes that functional and aesthetic character are mutually exclusive, which is false. Charles Hartshorne contends that songbirds enjoy their singing, even if it also protects their territory.62 The argument that the functionality of animal sounds is incompatible with those sounds being music would also ignore the fact that human music performs a wide variety of functions. Music serves vital educational purposes in virtually every culture; it is well suited to preserving and transmitting knowledge because it is a powerful mnemonic.63 For the same reason, it has been used in the preservation of cultural history and foundational texts (such as the Homeric poems and the Vedas).64 The Australian Aboriginals use the contours of the song to map routes across the country, and the ancient Hawaiians stored navigational and astronomical information in their songs.65 Music also facilitates cooperation in common activities, work songs being an obvious example. It can be used to manipulate the pace of various activities (shopping, dining, and working); Muzak and other environmental music systems are used precisely for this purpose. Music also promotes a sense of interpersonal solidarity, which has made it a useful tool for rallying support among political leaders and politicians. Many societies also use music for healing. This includes the Western world, where many people use it for emotional regulation, and the field of music therapy is burgeoning.66
Donald Hodges proposes another basis for differentiating human music from the “music” of other animals: “the degree of human involvement in such behaviors as language, social organizations, rituals, and music.”67 While it is not clear what “involvement” means, perhaps Hodges is suggesting that music is elaborated in connection with the other human practices he lists: language, social organization, and ritual. The links between human music and these practices is certainly important, but it is not obvious that other species’ “music” is less linked to their species-wide practices than human music is to our own. Moreover, animals seem to vocalize to express emotions in a manner similar to that of human beings, as Patrik Juslin and Petri Laukka indicate:
Given phylogenetic continuity of vocal expression and cross-species similarity in the kinds of situations that generate vocal expression, it is interesting to ask whether there is any evidence of cross-species universality of vocal expression. Limited evidence of this kind has indeed been found (Scherer, 1985; Snowdon, 2003). For instance, E. S. Morton (1977) noted that “birds and mammals use harsh, relatively low-frequency sounds when hostile, and higher-frequency, more pure tonelike sound when frightened, appeasing, or approaching in a friendly manner” (p. 855; see also Ohala, 1983). Another general principle, proposed by Jürgens (1979), is that increasing aversiveness of primate vocal calls is correlated with pitch, total pitch range, and irregularity of pitch contours. These features have also been associated with negative emotions in human vocal expression (Davitz, 1964b: Scherer, 1986).68
Perhaps Hodges’s point is like that of Walter Freeman, who comments, “Birds, whales, and cicadas ‘sing’ and ‘signal,’ but they do not manifest the richness of compassion and understanding that we experience in speaking and singing with one another.”69 But isn’t Freeman’s judgment that animals’ sounds fail to display compassion and understanding based on his observation that they do not indicate these things to us? Should we expect animals to express their sense of mutual affinity to other members of their respective species in the precise manner that we do?
Hodges acknowledges that animals use sounds in connection with “social communication and in courtship and mating rituals.”70 Some animal species employ music quite remarkably in this connection. A wide variety of bird species (most commonly tropical species that form long-term monogamous pair bonds) engage in complicated duets between a male and a female. Peter J. B. Slater remarks that some of these duets “have phenomenal precision of timing . . . the birds fitting their sounds together so precisely that it is hard to believe that more than one individual is involved.”71 Mated pairs of gibbons also sing duets in “relatively rigid, precisely timed, and complex vocal interactions to produce well-patterned duets.”72 These duets often climax with acrobatic display on the part of one or both partners, as well as piloerection (hair bristling) and branch shaking.73 Surely such behavior should count as “involvement.”
Yet another argument for denying that nonhuman animals have music is that they lack the originality and creativity that we associate with human music-making. Many songbirds do not show the same kind of musical creativity that human beings display. The songs many bird species learn are fixed quite early; a bird in one of these species is not able learn new songs after a certain stage in its development. It is also common among songbirds that songs are learned by directly copying the songs of older birds. Many songbirds are also less flexible with respect to pitch than human beings. John Sloboda presumably has such considerations in mind when he claims, “the functions of music for man find no parallel in the animal world; many of the most highly patterned sound behaviours (e.g., bird song) are relatively rigid intra-specific signals of territory, aggression, warning, etc.”74 But certain songbirds do have flexibility with respect to pitch, allowing for some individual variation in songs. Some birds also develop regional “dialects,” again indicating some room for departure from rigid adherence to fixed patterns.75 For that matter, human infants are initially inflexible (and people with perfect pitch remain relatively inflexible into adult life). Jenny Saffran claims that babies are like starlings, “who can switch from relying on absolute pitch cues to using relative pitch cues when necessitated by the structure of the task.”76
Human beings do seem to be more creative in their musical productions than animals, but we cannot say that musical creativity is restricted to human beings. Katharine Payne describes humpback whale song as being highly structured, complex, variously contoured, multithematic, and structured in a manner akin to rhyming. Very rarely does a humpback whale sing alone. In a particular population of humpback whales, the males (the exclusive singers of the species) are all singing the same song at any given time, a song that differs from that of other groups within the species. Moreover, the song being sung evolves as the singing progresses. Gradual changes, which are picked up by the entire singing group, emerge. Payne describes the results of her research:
Our analysis eventually included all the phrases from all the songs we collected from three decades in North Atlantic and Pacific humpback populations. The results suggest that the whales have an ever expanding number of ways to modify the structure of their notes, phrases, and themes. Each theme continually changes in its own way and at its own ever-changing rate, apparently as the consequence of decisions (whether conscious or unconscious) that are shared by all the singers. At any given time all the singers seem to agree which themes are stable and which are changing. For those that are changing they agree as to which aspects are changing and which are not, and how and to what extent they are changing.77
However, it is fair to say that human beings exhibit a kind of creativity that animals, at least apparently, do not. Human beings manipulate meaningful sounds into larger structures that produce further, emergent meanings. Peter Marler points out that while some birds and whales order their vocalizations creatively by recombining sounds (“phonocoding” in his parlance), the recombination of sound patterns along with the assignment of meaning to the elements of the signal (“lexicoding”) is unique to human beings.78 Aniruddh Patel points out that human music involves something further: the emergence of new meanings as a consequence of these recombinations.79
Are lexicoding and consequent emergent meaning essential to music? This seems to be the crux of the issue with regard to whether animals have music. If one argues that music requires multiple levels of hierarchical syntactical organization, of the sort that is displayed in language, human beings do seem to have a monopoly. In Western tonal music, for example, hierarchies relate scales, chords, and keys, and events are also organized hierarchically, with certain pitches being of greater structural importance for a particular passage of music. Syntactical ordering of the elements also affects the meaning, something that is apparently not the case in other animals’ sonic communications.80 If one requires this kind of hierarchical organization and meaning-affecting syntax of anything termed music, human music will be the only music by default.81
I do not think this amounts to a sufficient reason to discount animal music, however. In the first place, it is unclear to me that all instances of human song are so complex that hierarchical organization is clearly involved. W. Jay Dowling and Dane Harwood describe certain cultures, including that of the native Hawaiians, in which certain chants move back and forth between two pitches.82 Would this meet the bar for music if multilevel hierarchical organization is required? My guess is that those who insist on human music’s uniqueness because of its structural hierarchies with emergent meanings would not insist upon such complexity in every instance, only in music taken as a whole. But if two-pitch chants are acknowledged to be music, it strikes me as arbitrary to exclude sonic productions by animals that may be considerably more complicated.
Another reason for resisting the temptation to refuse the term music to animal sounds categorically is that we can’t know the animal’s perspective. We may feel comfortable enough attributing the meaning “This is my territory” to certain animal vocalizations. But we don’t know whether or not the meaning experienced by the animal is monodimensional. Affective meanings such as joy, self-expression, responsiveness to some change in the environment, and interactive engagement with other animals and their sounds are all levels of meaning that might be experienced by a vocalizing animal. Some of the dimensions of meaning in human music are experienced from the first person point of view.83 To posit that animal vocalizations “mean only one thing” is to ignore the subjective aspect of meaning that the animals themselves may experience.84
Naturally, we are going to evaluate from our own point(s) of view. But from a human perspective, the animation and aliveness of animals’ vocalizations seems engaging in itself. We recognize enough similarity to our music to refer to many of them as “song,” and these songs are often structurally interesting to us. Many of us find at least some animal vocalizations worthy of aesthetic contemplation.85 If one understands music broadly, these are grounds for applying the term to at least some of these animal sounds.
SPECIES PRIDE
Reviewing the arguments against animal music, we observe the following alleged criteria of musicality: melody, scales, capacity for musical experience, intelligent design, complexity of musical structure, subtlety of response, aesthetic pleasure, creativity, involvement, expressiveness, and the rearrangement of meaningful elements to produce new meanings. Only the last appears to be unique to human music. Yet assuming that these arguments reflect sensibilities that are more widespread than the sources quoted, I see them as evidence that we take pride in our musicality as displaying our kind of intelligence and sensitivity. Scruton expresses this straightforwardly: “only rational beings make and listen to music . . . our music is the music of upright, earth-bound, active, love-hungry beings. Words move, music moves, ‘so as to reach into the silence’—so as to claim for our humanity the speechless space surrounding us.”86 We hear ourselves in music, and we are gratified by the sense of ourselves that results.
The case of the Voyager space probe suggests that the philosophers just considered are not idiosyncratic in thinking that music expresses our species nature. In 1977 the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) launched its Voyager program, with enough fuel and electric power to operate until 2020. It sent two spacecraft with the mission of exploring the outer solar system and beyond. Recognizing that the Voyager satellites could be the first human artifacts to reach intelligent beings elsewhere in the universe, NASA pondered what gesture should be sent to these unknown beings to express who we are. The conclusion reached was that we should send the sounds of our world, our verbal greetings and our music.87
And so a gold-plated twelve-inch copper phonograph record was attached to each of the Voyager spacecrafts, along with a needle and symbolic instructions for playing the record. The record includes 115 analog depictions of things on earth, recordings of sounds,88 greetings in fifty-five languages, and also a ninety-minute recording of twenty-seven pieces of music.89 On first encounter, alien beings will not know the translations of our words, but they might find some meaning in the sounds. The music (selected by a committee chaired by Carl Sagan) is a potpourri of the music of our “sphere”: several works or movements from the Western classical tradition (by Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and Stravinsky, including the “Sacrificial Dance” from The Rite of Spring), instances of jazz (“Melancholy Blues,” by Louis Armstrong), rhythm and blues (by Chuck Berry), and the blues (“Dark Was the Night” by Blind Willie Johnson), as well as works from Java, Senegal, Zaire, Aboriginal Australia, Mexico, New Guinea, Japan, Georgia, Peru, Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, the Navajo Nation, the Solomon Islands, China, and India. Music—a more universal language than it has ever been before.
Or is it? At this point in history, the Western world acknowledges its common humanity with people across the globe, but it is only beginning to recognize the common humanity of the world’s music. Despite his musical ethnocentrism, Scruton describes aesthetic experience in universal terms:
The aesthetic experience is a lived encounter between object and subject, in which the subject takes on a universal significance. The meaning that I find in the object is the meaning that it has for all who live like me, for all members of my “imagined community,” who share our “first-person plural” and whose joys and sufferings are mirrored in me.90
I agree with Scruton that music engenders a sense of shared experience. Music, as most of us think of it, is what “we” have; hence the many grounds on which some deny the existence of animal music. At issue, though, is how large a group this “we” is. The song of a bird or a whale, I am convinced, can already make us aware of sharing a world with other sentient beings, and enjoyably at that. If this is so, shouldn’t human music show us even more compellingly that we share the world with other human beings?