Animal sound communication, human language, and perspectivism

          I return to the question of animal sound communication, which I wrote about in January of this year. Animals—humans included—communicate with one another in song, speech, and various in-between modes such as chant. Animals also communicate by manipulating objects to make sounds, whether beavers slapping the water with their tails or humans playing musical instruments. Because animal communication is necessary for survival, it is necessary for sustainability of life as we know it on planet Earth. Sound, of course, is one of the principal ways in which animals communicate with one another.
         Among the questions that interest scientists about nonhuman animal sound communication are, first of all, whether species’ communication in sound is purely functional, or whether it has an aesthetic component. Do animals always make sounds for a practical purpose, in other words, or might they do it for pleasure, as humans do? Might some of their practical sounds, such as birdsong, offer pleasure as well as having functions such as locating oneself to one’s mate? A second question is whether animal sounds constitute language. That is, do they exhibit the structural and functional characteristics of what we know as language, even if in some simple stage? Or are their sounds merely signals? Songbirds, humpback whales, chimpanzees, elephants and dolphins seem to be good test cases for language. All of them communicate with a variety of complex sounds; in terms of their structure, could they constitute a language? Scientists do not agree on the answer. Generally speaking, the evolutionary biologists who study animal behavior and sound communication favor the idea that nonhuman animal sounds, no matter how complex they are in structure, constitute signals, stimuli that result in automatic responses in the listening animal. At the same time, many scientists are conducting experiments to see if that is really true, or if the complex sounds of some species could be said to constitute anything resembling a language, and whether there is any evidence suggesting that it also has an aesthetic component.
         Recently I came upon an educational website that pursued differences between human and animal communication. The linked to a lecture by a professor at the Leiden University Center for Linguistics, and then examined the supposed differences between human and nonhuman animal communication. As I read through these differences, I realized that some of the evidence from birdsong and humpback whale song casts doubt on those claims for difference, or at least for a sharp dividing line between human and nonhuman.

Black-capped chickadee. Photo by Ryan Hodnett

         For example, humans are said to be able to string sounds together in an infinite number of ways to create meaning via words and sentences, and animals are said not to communicate by arranging sounds in this way. And yet there is scientific evidence that chickadees string together phonemes in a simple manner to indicate, for example, not only that there is a danger from a nearby predator, but also how great is that danger. Humpback whales, also, have been observed to string together sounds in different ways to indicate different meanings. Part of the difficulty here, it would seem, is that humans do not understand animal language. For another example, humans are said to be able to invent new words easily, whereas animals must evolve in order for their signals to change. But the invention of new words and their addition to human language proceeds slowly, whereas animals change their signs before they evolve, and then evolution selects those whose signs are most suitable for survival. A few songbirds, for example, who are permanent residents near highways change the pitch range of their songs to avoid traffic noise, and only then does natural selection favor those birds that have changed their songs, resulting in a higher percentage of birds that have adapted and that can, presumably, survive better. Experiments have shown that this evolution is rapid.
         A couple of other differences turn out to have exceptions, also. It is said that humans acquire language culturally, by learning, whereas animal communication is inborn and cannot be learned. But that isn’t so. Songbirds raised by foster parents of another species learn to sing their foster parents’ songs. Another difference discussed on the website is arbitrariness: human language is symbolic and filled with ideas, whereas animal communication is said not to be symbolic. The jury is still out on that one, but one wonders how we would be able to recognize whether animal communication was symbolic when we don’t understand their sounds in the same way they do. In other words, what we conclude by observation to be no more than stimulus and response may in fact be arbitrary to some extent on account of its complexity, or on account of factors that we ordinarily wouldn’t take into consideration, such as the time of day or night of the utterance, its tempo, how frequently it is repeated, and so on.
         For centuries scientists have claimed that only human beings have language, but it no longer certain that this is true. Instead, it’s possible that language is something best understood to exist on a continuum of development, with humans having a more fully developed language while some other animals exhibit it at an earlier stage of development. If animals exist on an evolutionary continuum, it makes some sense to think of language in this way. Obviously, humans have had the capacity to develop language into a very sophisticated communications tool, and beyond that into an artistic expression with aesthetic qualities. At the same time, we should not be too hasty in assuming that animals communicate only by means of signals that act as stimuli to effect responses. After all, scientists do not know what it is like to communicate as a whale or a dolphin or an elephant.
         On the other hand, many Amerindian indigenous peoples’ ecological knowledges take a very different approach to animals and animal sound communication: perspectivism and multinaturalism. I’ve written about this to some extent in a completed chapter for an as-yet-unpublished book edited by Harris Berger, one that has been in the making for a decade or so: the "Oxford Handbook of Phenomenological Ethnomusicology." In it, I discuss evidence for expressive culture among animals. From a perspectivist viewpoint, animals have intentionality, consciousness, reflective thought, experience, aesthetics, language, and expressive culture because what it is like to communicate as a whale or dolphin or elephant from the animal’s point of view is exactly the same as what it is like to communicate as a human because animals think of themselves as humans.

Cultural Sustainabilities: Music, Media, Language, Advocacy--A Conference at UCSB May 24-26, 2018

     In an earlier entry I mentioned the upcoming conference on cultural and musical sustainabilities, at the University of California at Santa Barbara, to take place later this month--May 24-26 to be exact. If you're in the Los Angeles/Santa Barbara area, it might be of interest to you. There is no admission charge. Here is the flyer advertising it:

The language of avoidance

    All of the presentations at the recent cultural sustainability symposium at Sterling College interested me, but in this and the next few entries I’ll single out some of those that linked most directly to the kind of thinking that’s engaged me on this blog: those by William Westerman, Mary Hufford, Rosann Kent, Nancy Menning, Michael Lange, and the field session with Farley Brown and Ross Morgan that concluded the symposium.
    Westerman spoke about the need to understand, confront, reveal and undermine those social, political and economic forces whose actions “disrupt local cultures with destructive, sometimes even genocidal, impact.” As he pointed out, people make decisions that set those forces in motion. They often are hard to identify because the disruption is often chronicled in the passive voice—events just seem to occur, and causation is not assigned.
    Much of what Westerman said is congruent with my own argument that culture workers must consider economic and environmental threats to cultural continuity, rather than confine ourselves to helping communities promote and maintain their traditional and characteristic artistic expressions, be they music, ethnic foods, religious folklife, dance, and so forth. Culture workers, who are trained to identify and document tradition-bearers (folk artists), ought also to direct efforts at identifying and documenting those people who give agency to the disruptive and destructive economic and environmental forces, and to exposing them.
    But Westerman’s focus on the language in which these problems are addressed is absolutely critical (a theme, also, of Mary Hufford’s presentation). It isn't just about what we say but how we think and therefore how we know, and how we can know. (The technical term for this is epistemology.) When one says, “The New York and New Jersey Coast was devastated by Superstorm Sandy,” that is the passive voice: the Coast “was devastated.” The fact is stated but the cause is not identified. If, instead, one says “Climate change is causing violent storms like Superstorm Sandy that devastated the New York and New Jersey Coast,” we have the active voice, which identifies the actor (cause), in this case climate change. Examples like this are more useful than contrasting sentences such as "The ball was hit to center field by John" versus "John hit the ball to center field." Of course, it's possible to identify actors in the passive voice ("by John" in the above contrast); but often the actor is absent, and sometimes on purpose.
    Westerman’s concentration on the evasive language of the passive voice reminded me of “Strunk and White” (The Elements of Style) with its prescription to use the active voice, chiefly to make writing vigorous. Contemporary contrarians have delighted in pointing out grammatical errors in their examples of the passive voice. But Strunk and White isn’t about grammar: it’s about style. And using the active voice is about more than style; it’s about naming “whodunit.” The passive voice, as George Orwell pointed out more than sixty years ago in his essay, "Politics and the English Language," is the deadening language of government bureaucracy. It’s a language of avoidance; it’s “official language,” it’s what my own freshman English teacher, William E. Coles, Jr., back in the day, used to call “bulletproof language.”
    Fifty years ago, Norman Mailer understood the paralyzing consequences of Lyndon Johnson’s bulletproof language. In one of the finest analyses of the failures of the passive voice, Mailer critiqued Lyndon Johnson’s presidential campaign book, My Hope for America. Mailer's book, Cannibals and Christians (1966), contains that essay. In it, Mailer showed just how Johnson’s passive voice avoided naming and blaming, and in failing to say what were the causes of, say, poverty in America, Johnson’s language disabled him (and others) from thinking clearly about it and therefore from effectively addressing its causes.
     I was reminded, also, of a Cambridge Forum broadcast from October of 2011, featuring Bill McKibben and Wendell Berry, in honor of Thoreau’s essay on "Civil Disobedience." In the midst of the discussion, someone asked Berry why he was still willing to talk to those coal barons responsible for mountaintop removal when it was obvious that they weren't listening. The gist of his reply was that good people can still do terrible things, and if they're good people we must talk to them and try to reach the good within them. They need to know that "they're in the house that they're burning down. . . . and maybe we can help them put the fire out.” (View Berry's entire response at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UY_o6lpXlMo).
     In other words, it's not enough simply to say that the house is burning down, or we're in ecological crisis, or that local cultures are disappearing. They are "being disappeared," as Tony Seeger reminded us at the symposium; and it's up to us culture workers to identify the people who hide behind the passive voice, and to try to keep a dialogue open with those powerful "good people who do terrible things." The language of avoidance blinds them to causation, keeps them from knowing that they are burning down the house that we all are in. But the spirit of non-violent resistance appeals to the good in them, in hopes that they will listen and we can put the fire out together.

"Original-Ecology Music"

    I first encountered the idea of “original-ecology music” early in October, on my way back to northern New England from Knoxville. The occasion was the conference at Northeastern University in Boston, celebrating the publication (in English) of a book entitled Discourse in Music, edited by Zhang Boyu, director of the world music program in ethnomusicology at the Central Conservatory of Music, in Beijing.(1)  Professor Zhang had invited me to Beijing to lecture on music and sustainability in 2009, so I was looking forward to seeing him again, presenting a paper at the conference, and helping celebrate this milestone, as very little scholarship by Chinese musicologists and ethnomusicologists is currently available in English. Three of the book’s articles were concerned with “original-ecology music” in one way or another.(2) Was it possible that Chinese scholars were thinking about music and sustainability in terms of an ecological model?
    The answer is both no and yet, embedded in the Chinese language, yes. It turns out that “original-ecology music” is a linguistic back-formation from the written Chinese characters for the phrase “original style.” That is, according to the article by Tian Liantao, “The phrase ‘original style’ in Chinese includes the word ‘ecology’. . .” (Discourse, 118). Moreover, “folk song of original style” was “first proposed [around the year 2002] by show business rather than the music society [i.e., music scholars]” in order to distinguish the older folk song performances, felt to be more authentic in melody and performance style, from performances rendered by professional Chinese folksingers, which show modern and Western influences (Ibid., 119).
    The three Chinese musicologists who wrote about original-ecology music in the volume are specialists in the music of Chinese minorities. China, like Europe and North America, has a history of cultivated, semi-professional, and professional folk music. Coupled is the familiar idea that there is, or was, a more authentic, spontaneous, uncontaminated folk music expression. “In my understanding,” Professor Yu Renhao wrote, “‘original-ecology music’ generally refers to folk music formed in the natural economy, which hasn’t been affected too much by foreign culture. . . . Its ‘original flavor’ is reflected not only in the tunes, but reflected even more in the performance form and style. . .” (Ibid, 255). This untutored folk music is said to be characteristic of peasant and minority people in the “natural economy” of remote rural areas. There, it is thought that traditional agricultural life and music was and to a far lesser degree still is relatively unaffected by travel, trade, towns, cities, merchants, money, scholars, government bureaucracy, formal educational institutions, and foreign influence.
    Western ethnomusicologists of my generation were taught that Chinese scholars and bureaucrats, like those in the Soviet Union, collected, edited, transformed, and composed and promoted folksongs to reflect the kind of worker’s consciousness desired by the government after the Communist Revolution in 1949. But as Jonathan Stock pointed out in Worlds of Music, Chinese government officials had for centuries been collecting folk music and putting it to their use.(3) “In ancient China, the emperor sent out officials to gather song texts to help him judge whether the people were happy or not,” while  seventeenth century Chinese scholars collected folksongs but published only those which they felt had literary merit (Worlds, 372). Francis James Child, the Harvard professor who collected and published his famous 5-volume anthology of English and Scottish ballads in the nineteenth century, employed similar criteria. The concept “folk song” is a construction of the educated, literary class, sometimes put to use by various political groups.
    Professor Yu concluded that “In order to avoid misunderstandings, I suggest using the term ‘native folk music art’ in lieu of the so-called music of ‘original ecology’” (Ibid., 58). Still, it intrigues me that the Chinese characters written for “original style” contain the character for “ecology.” This linguistic formation suggests that style does not exist primarily as structure, or even as a combination of structure and performance. Rather, embedded directly within the etymology of the Chinese language is the idea that structure and performance style interact with the surrounding natural and cultural communities. That structure and performance style interact with the surrounding cultural community is constitutive of ethnomusicology, and one of the axioms that in the 1950s established it as a new discipline and separated it from its ancestor, comparative musicology. But that structure and performance style also interact with the surrounding natural community is an idea only now gaining momentum within the West.
    As I have mentioned in numerous blog entries earlier this year, Thoreau was the pioneer in this line of thought concerning nature and sound-worlds, in the mid-nineteenth century. John Cage, Murray Schafer, Steve Feld, Bernie Krause and Ted Levin are among those composers and scholars who have promoted this idea more recently. But a relation between music, sound, and the natural world is not only embedded in the Chinese characters that make up the Chinese language, it has precedent in ancient Chinese writing. Unaware of “original-ecology music” when preparing my presentation to the conference at Northeastern, I nevertheless had tried to find common ground between Thoraeu’s ideas of sound in the natural world and ancient Chinese thought. Here is what I said to them at the conference:
    “Thinking about our Chinese guests today, I was reminded of the ancient Chinese legend of the origins of music in the discovery of bamboo tubes that blew overtones in fifths. Looking a little further in ancient Chinese history, I came upon the Daoist text called Zhuangzi, named after the Chinese author who lived nearly 2,500 years ago. In English translation, the text reads as follows:
     “Zi-Qi said, ‘. . .  You may have heard the notes of Man, but have not heard those of Earth; you may have heard the notes of Earth, but have not heard those of Heaven.'
     Zi-You said, 'I venture to ask from you a description of all these.'
     The reply was, 'When the breath of [Nature] comes strongly, it is called Wind. Sometimes it does not come so; but when it does, then from a myriad openings there issues its excited noise; have you not heard it in a prolonged gale? Take the projecting bluff of a mountain forest - in the great trees, a hundred spans round, the [openings] are like the nostrils, or the mouth, or the ears; now square, now round like a cup or a mortar; here like a wet footprint, and there like a large puddle. (The sounds issuing from them are like) those of angry water, of the arrow’s whizz, of the stern command, of the inhaling of the breath, of the shout, of the gruff note, of the deep wail, of the sad and piping note. The first notes are slight, and those that follow deeper, but in harmony with them. Gentle winds produce a small response; violent winds a great one. When the fierce gusts have passed away, all the openings are empty (and still) - have you not seen this in the bending and quivering of the branches and leaves?'
    Zi-You said, 'The notes of Earth then are simply those which come from its myriad openings; and the notes of Man may just be compared to those which (are brought from the tubes of) bamboo- allow me to ask about the notes of Heaven.'
    Zi-Qi replied, 'Blowing the myriad differences, making them stop [proceed] of themselves, sealing their self-selecting - who is it that stirs it all up?’”
   
Notes

1. Discourse in Music: Collected Essays of the Musicology Department, Central Conservatory of Music, ed. Zhang Boyu. Beijing: Central Conservatory of Music Press, 2012.

2. Tian Liantau, "Original Style: 'Original-State' or 'Original-Ecology'?", pp. 118-124; He Yunfeng, "Some Doubts about 'Protoecological' Music," pp. 153-161; Yu Renhao, "Music of Original Ecology and Original Ecology of Music," pp. 255-258, in Discourse in Music (see n.1).

3. Jonathan Stock, "East Asia," in Worlds of Music, 5th ed., Jeff Todd Titon, gen. ed. Belmont, CA: Schirmer Cengage Learning, 2009.

Bird Song, Borror, Thoreau, and Traveling in Place

I used to think birds of the same species were genetically programmed to sing the same song. And so when I began listening carefully to bird song, I was surprised to find slight variations. I assumed these were accidental, the result of a bird's genetic defects or my inexperience in listening. Curious, I began reading what the ornithologists had to say about it. It turns out that, on the contrary, some young male birds must "learn" their species song from their elders. And very occasionally one does not get it quite right--and when that happens, the offspring may learn that slightly different melody.

Today on my walk in the woods, after three days of heavy rain, I heard a bird singing three of the five notes of the black-throated green warbler's song--the first, second, and fourth only. I concluded that it must be a youngster learning his song. Within a half-mile radius, a couple of other adult birds of that same species were singing all five, so it won't be long before this youngster likely has it right.

But one of the consequences of birds having to learn their songs is that songs of the same species may vary a bit, according to geographical region. The black-throated green warbler's five-note song on this island in East Penobscot Bay, where I spend time when not teaching at Brown or traveling, is typical for Maine. But black-throated green warblers who take up their spring and summer residences outside this region of northern New England sometimes feature a four-note song--that is, only four of the five heard around here. And some have a six-note song, even here.

Novice bird watchers often have difficulty recognizing songbirds by sight--they are small, shy, and do not care to be close to humans. Moving targets, they are not easy to bring up close with binoculars until the novice has practiced with them. In the spring and summer when they are singing, mating, and nest-building they are easier to recognize by sound than sight. Besides, anyone with an interest in the soundscape will pay attention to bird song.

About fifteen years ago I made tape recordings of bird songs on the island where I spend time when not teaching at Brown or traveling. In hopes of identifying them, I compared my recordings to the standard ones on CDs from the Audubon Society and other authoritative sources. But some of the identifications were difficult or impossible, due, I realized, to differences in regional bird song dialects.

To proceed, I needed to find recordings of the birdsong dialects I was hearing. After some searching, I found that Donald Borror (1907-1988), of the Ohio State University, made the recordings that most closely matched the bird songs I was hearing in Maine, and for an obvious reason: he recorded them in Maine. (A brief and informative biography of this bioacoustics pioneer may be found at http://elibrary.unm.edu/sora/Auk/v106n02/p0321-p0323.pdf). 

Borror used a top-of-the-line Nagra reel to reel tape machine with a very sensitive microphone inside of a parabolic cone. (He was also a pioneer in recording techniques.) As a result, his recordings are technically excellent even by today's digital standards. Some of his recordings were issued on LPs in the 1960s, with his commentary aimed at bird watchers interested in identifying birds and bird behavior by sounds. Dover Publications reissued them as cassettes, in the early 1970s, with lengthy accompanying booklets. Borror understood about song dialects and on these recordings aimed at the general public he was careful to say where he made each recording. Today, thousands of Borror's recordings are available for listening on the Ohio State website at http://drc.ohiolink.edu/handle/2374.OX/30658 but this huge database is useful primarily for the scientist and advanced birder wanting to compare songs from the same species according to geographic area and over a forty-year time period. There are, for example, more than fifty separate recordings in the database for the black-throated green warbler. 

Interestingly, Borror also released an LP (Bird Song and Bird Behavior), later reissued by Dover on cassette, which took up various topics of interest to anyone curious about bird song, including how to make recordings of bird songs (and the problems in doing so), classifying bird sounds, types of songs, singing habits, song development in a particular bird, geographic variation in songs, duet singing, differences between songs and calls, making sound spectrograms of bird songs, and so forth. Borror's biographer, his colleague Sandra Gaunt, wrote that he "was a private and retiring person. He preferred to spend his time in the field collecting or in the laboratory organizing, analyzing, and describing his collection." 

Like Thoreau, Borror observed natural sounds by returning seasonally to the very same locations, year after year. Like a bird, Borror migrated annually from southern Ohio to the state of Maine, recording in both places. Gaunt writes, "I once asked Borror if he did not wish that he had traveled more broadly in his years of collecting. He allowed that his participation in the Pacific Theater [in World War II] was all the world travel he cared to experience and, more seriously, that there was more than enough to document at home." Emerson criticized Thoreau for staying close to his home in Concord, Massachusetts most of his life. Thoreau fashioned his reply: "I have traveled much in Concord." Indeed, Thoreau walked every afternoon (and on moonlit nights) to observe the changes in the natural world and, occasionally, his neighbors. Ecologists, of course, study small area ecosystems intensively today. Gaunt concluded, "For many of [Borror's] locations he obtained recordings of many species for nearly 40 consecutive years. These repeated samples supported the research effort of one man, and today they are a valuable, if not unique, resource for future studies, especially studies of song pattern variation in time." 

Bird song presents an interesting contrast with music; that is, with music as humanly organized sound. We have no problem calling bird vocalizations "song" even though they do not meet the scientific criteria for music. Nor do they meet the criteria for language, because they lack language's recursive qualities. Music composers throughout history and in many different cultures have been inspired by the melodies of bird song, sometimes directly imitating it, and sometimes transforming it. One ethnomusicologist, Steve Feld, wrote a book about the complex cultural ramifications of the belief, among the Kaluli people of Papua New Guinea, that bird song is a signal from departed ancestors.

What are the songs of birds telling us about sound and communication, the uses of sound as signal (territory, mood, danger, location, etc.)? What do they tell us about sound and place, about sound and movement, about the ecology of the acoustic niche? And finally, what can we learn from birds about music, sound, and sustainability? Thoreau and Borror both were struck by the seasonal, the calendrical, the cyclical repetitions of bird song and sound in the natural world. Thoreau's last great (and unfinished) project was his cyclical "Kalendar" of the seasonally changing natural world around Concord; his journal observations were made to that end, as were Borror's recordings--longitudinal studies, intensively rather than extensively, of sound and sustainability, by traveling in place.