Listening with Lisa: What is Music?
This week, I wanted to ponder the question: what is music? An amalgamation of melodies, chord progressions, and rhythms may be the first answer that comes to our human minds… but what about creatures who don’t share the luxury of having a written language? What is music to them?
Music is not limited to transpirations through traditional acoustic or electric instruments, nor human voices. Predictable tones, timbres, and sounds comprising melodies are elements of music that most people are familiar with experiencing; however, music is just that—an experience.
Sounds, both natural and artificial, can come together in limitless ways to create music. Whales produce sounds of high and low frequencies with interesting swells in volume. Birds generate a wide variety of sounds through whistling and chirping; parrots can even copy words they hear humans say, speaking languages, although they may not comprehend what’s being said.
Amplitude, frequency, timbre, and duration are the components of tone noted by Bakan in the World Book: Traditions and Transformation. As Bakan explains in the first proposition for exploring world music, the listed elements differentiate musical sounds from other sounds.
Although in an avant-garde fashion, perhaps, bird sounds contain the facets of tone. Bird chirps vary in length, pitch, volume, and timbre unique to the different types of birds. When listening to an amalgam of bird chirps, say, in a forest, the independent frequencies create both harmony and dissonance.
Whilst birds can create sounds of much wider variety, whales also produce sounds that fit the criteria for musical sounds.
Similar to sirens, whale sounds crescendo and decrescendo, as well as glissando between frequencies. The timbre of whale calls is dark, warm, and deep; the duration is usually between one and four seconds; the frequency can be high or low; the amplitude is hard to tell (when limited to YouTube videos) but seems to be quite loud and further amplified with water being the transmitting medium.
Intention and perception are more of Bakan’s points of emphasis in deciding what is considered music, as explained in his fourth proposition of exploring world music.
For (human) artists, music is our form of communication… it’s our language; birds’ and whales’ languages encompass the details of tone, so who are humans to denounce it as music?
If humans listen with the intent of experiencing the animals’ language as music, then bird and whale sounds are just that—music.
