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 […]
Archive of posts tagged Birds
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 […]
The Robin & the Towhee
There are new Boird Band songs posted here! Drag over the black stemmed noteheads to hear the bird and how he might sound on an electric guitar. The American Robin sings “Cheerily, Cheeriup, Cheerio”. The above riff consists of perfect fourths going up and down. C is 4 degrees higher than an F, and G […]
Cardinal
A lot of birds out there sound like dial-up modems, but not many have cool vintage lazer sounds like this guy. In phoneticized bird, he’s saying “purdy purdy purdy – whoit whoit whoit.” Sometimes, he says “wheet” instead. Here’s the full song. I took a lot of artistic license with this one. In reality, birds […]
The Mourning Dove
This little guy is so good. He sounds like a panflute. He flattens the decay on each of his notes. His song is in the key of C# Mixolydian, but he often changes key. The second phrase modulates down a half step, but it isn’t a perfect transposition to C Mixolydian. Instead of hitting the […]
Chickadee
This is my new jam. Boird Band. Go see the myspace yup. It’s ‘free punk’ renditions of classic bird songs. That above boird you’re looking at is a black-capped chickadee. He’s got a nice little song – verse chorus verse. The verse consists of a two-note melody: B ► A, and the killer chorus takes […]
