Birdsong

On a trip to visit my son recently I spotted a number of birds sitting on what I think were power cables strung across the highway. (Perhaps they were looking out for wildfires.)

I was immediately reminded of a musical stave, with the resting birds as notes. So I played them. Here’s what they sound like (as ⅛ ♪).

It was a bit of a challenge determining where a “note” fell in the photo, but my rule was if any of the bird visibly descended below a wire it counted as being a note bisected by the line. If not, it was a note between lines. I didn’t put bar lines in or really attempt slurs or much beyond quantization and legato.

I’m not the first to do this. Brazilian musician Jarbas Agnelli beat me to the idea in 2009.

There’s nothing natural or inherent about modern staff notation of course — or of any of the many alternate ways of transcribing music. But the relationship between tones is mathematical and thus spatial arrangement takes on mathematical meaning when music becomings symbolic. Great composers design this spatial arrangement like master architects. Many can write music ex nihilo without first playing it, creating music purely as ink blots on and between lines.

Why are those birds grouped the way they are? Is it completely arbitrary? Are the two birds at far left engaged in something? Is the one at far right outcast? Why do the numbers of birds decrease as the wires get lower? I have no idea, but I do think there is meaning in their arrangement.

The recording above is sonorous, at least, if not exactly catchy. I derive no avian insight from their placement in sonified form. Maybe there’s order there, mathematical or even natural.

I’m going to keep listening.