[LINK] "Songbirds Share Our Musical Scales"

[rfmcdonald]

IFL Science reports on a recent study that seems to hint that the particular musical tastes of human beings are deeply ingrained in nature.

There’s a long-running debate about the extent to which the structure of human musical scales derives from biological aspects (such as our auditory perception and vocal production) or as the product of historical, cultural accidents. In other words, is the origin of human music more biological or more cultural? For added perspective, researchers have turned increasingly to birds and whales.

If human music is culturally bound or dependent on specific characteristics of our voice and hearing system, then these traits should be absent from animal vocalizations. “If an aspect of music is found not only in humans, but also in a variety of non-human species, this would suggest that there may be something in our shared biology that predisposes us to find that aspect interesting, or attractive, or easy to sing,” says study coauthor Emily Doolittle of the Cornish College of the Arts.

So, Doolittle and a team led by W. Tecumseh Fitch from the University of Vienna studied song recordings of 14 male hermit thrushes sampled throughout the U.S. They analyzed the pitches and frequency of sounds in 71 song types that contain 10 or more notes. “The idea that hermit thrushes sing scales -- particularly pentatonic [five-note] scales -- seems to have captured the human imagination and has been repeated so often that many people assume it is true,” Doolittle tells Smithsonian. The team initially set out to refute these claims... they were surprised.

According to their statistical models, most of the hermit thrushes’ songs contain musical scales that are mathematically similar to the harmonic series commonly used in our musical scales. A harmonic series, Smithsonian explains, includes a fundamental base note followed by notes that continue to increase in audio frequency based on multiples of that note. This mathematical distribution is known as integer multiples.