The turtle dove sings around a C♮ and C# in sets of three. Click and drag over each phrase above. Those are trills of 64th notes, or maybe even 128th notes. You can call them “hemdemisemiquavers”. To check his pitch, just click the Rabbit Face on the Color Keyboard up top. That’s a C Natural [...]
Archive of posts tagged Animal Music
Owlisimo
Igor Stravinsky relates the following story in his “Conversations with Robert Craft” (Now with computerized sounds!): “On a recent visit to Asolo, to see the composer Malipiero, I was strongly reminded of D’Annunzio. Malipiero has a most extraordinary and not entirely un-D’Annunzian house himself, a fine Venetian building on a hillside. One enters under a [...]
Simiophone
Yo, listen to this gorilla’s territorial jam on the youtube below. First, the gorilla warms up with a series of ascending hoots like an owl, like a walking bass line, before pummeling out a thunderous drum fill on the membranophone of his own body, where every pec is a tom tom. This 4/4 chest beat [...]
Musicquito
This mosquito’s got the high E. She plays it on her wings like all the other insects. Roll over the notehead below. Should you hear this Blood Tone, you’d do well to make haste. Mosquitoes kill more people than any other animal. Or, if you practice ahimsa, maybe you can vamp on the mosquito’s drone. [...]
Fly Sharp
The house fly drones in F Sharp (F#). She’s a little sharper than that, but with the doppler shift constantly bending her drone as she flies away, the F# is probably around where she lands. Roll over the notehead below. F Sharp is an obscure tone. In Meantone Tuning, the common European tuning from 1500 [...]
Mellifluous Melodies
The honey bee drones in C (C♮). Roll over the notehead below. Sometimes, in honor of his namesake, he’ll drone down to a B (B♮). Ya know, like “B/Bee/Be natural”? Does anyone take reality seriously when this kind of thing exists? Mnemonic Device: Sharp Bees Buzz a B Sharp! The tone C might just be [...]
Hooty Duets
The Great Horned Owl has a semitonal hoot. The male and female display musical dimorphism in their hooty duets. Male hooters usually end up somewhere around the human note E, and female hooters sing something like an A. Though there is much tonal variation in owl pairs, female owls are about a fourth above males. [...]
The Eight Hooter
The Barred Owl’s song has 8 hoots and ends in a descending oo-aw. Ornithologists like to sing the mnemonic: “Who cooks for you, who cooks for you all?” The song is swung and in the key of B Minor Lydian. Drag over the note heads below. Owls are like upright basses. They hoot in jazzy [...]
Spring Has Sung
As the Winter white noise fades, the peepers emerge from their silent hibernation to once again sing the sexy song of Spring. Choruses of these pinkletinks take the stage of wetland venues all along the Eastern seaboard to jam on a single note; a slightly rising G tone. This is the highest G found on [...]
Stridulations
If the woods were a jam, the crickets would provide a high-pictched pedal point with their incessant chirping for the birds to solo over. Crickets chrip all around a D tone. If you drag the mouse back and forth over the score above, you can get a sense of what a field of crickets sound [...]
