Why Birds Sing: A Journey into the Mystery of Bird Song by David Rothenberg

Author:David Rothenberg
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Basic Books

FOUR OUT OF THE FIFTEEN PHRASE TYPES OF

SOTAVALTA’S THRUSH NIGHTINGALE

NAGUIB’S THRUSH NIGHTINGALE PHRASE SONOGRAMS

In this case the musical notation shows more nuance, even if it looks too human. Sotavalta analyzed the sequence of phrases in detail and concluded that the bird went through his phrases in a loosely patterned order. There were cycles upon cycles in the structure of the whole song, but each series has some variation. There was a sense of a regular progression through the repertoire, but no sequence of riffs was precisely the same as the next (as the jagged line on page 133 shows).

Sotavalta listened acutely and perceptively to decode the structure of the thrush nightingale’s song. He found clear rules in it, yet no line of research was based on his conclusions. Like Nice and Craig, he was a maverick listener, off the main track of sonography, playback, and enumeration. Later nightingale researchers scoffed at his sample size of only two individual birds! And he used a kind of musical argumentation that is difficult to quantify. Yet he traced the secrets of nightingale music more accurately than anyone since. He revealed perhaps why so little Western music has actually been based on nightingale song, despite the vast metaphorical power of this bird’s image. But the nightingale has been revered outside science, all over the world.

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