While wandering around the woods recently, I came upon a mutation of thrushes. That’s what a group of thrushes is called: a mutation. Ancient scientists believed thrushes mutated on their 10th birthday, growing new legs or something, which is strange because they only live 9 years. Scientists used to be so stupid, not the infallible […]
Archive of posts tagged Animal Music
Red-Winged Blackbird
Everyone in America has heard the song of the red-winged blackbird. It’s one of those birds that sounds like a dial-up modem. Back in the old days, you had to fire up the internet and it played sweet electronic music like a chorus of annoying birds. Now the internet is always on and it sucks. […]
The Common Loon Tremolo
In our last post, we covered the famous wail of the Common Loon. But that’s not the only haunting sound these birds make. Click the score below to hear the tremolo. When slowed down, you can hear the interval of a Minor Seventh. The loon starts around an F#, fires off odd tuplets of a […]
The Common Loon Wail
What has a black head, beady red eyes, and cries like a banshee? It’s the Common Loon! Drag over the noteheads to listen. The Common Loon sings an interval of an imperfect fourth, usually from E to A. This is a much wider interval than most birds, who commonly sing thirds. The mysterious wail of […]
Whistler’s Monkey
Bonnie is an orangutan (not a monkey) living at the National Zoo who taught herself how to whistle. And get this: she doesn’t just whistle for food rewards! She actually—bear with me here—likes to whistle, although we can’t be sure. We have to put ‘likes’ in single quotes, because I still can’t understand why an […]
Mockingjays
Spring has sung, and the birds are back. And not just the songbirds either, but naughty little fuckbirds1 too. Black-Capped-Fuckadees that go fuck-a-dee-dee-dee2. Songless Woodfuckers3 who can only drum out their love. Bluefucks and yellow-tailed whippoorfucks. Perhaps they are speaking the divine dirty ‘language of the birds’. Or just letting their harmonic throats do the […]
Hipporhythmics: The Four Horse Beats of the Apocalypse
Zoomusicologists are just now beginning to understand the enormous influence non-human animal music has had on the development of human animal music. The three traditional aspects of music―melody, harmony, and rhythm―are not uniquely human at all, and were in fact copied from our fellow animal musicians. Songbirds showed mankind how to whistle melody, in Major […]
