![]() It was once thought that bird song was the only form of animal music and the term “bird song” is used not only by biologists but also by musicologists, this tradition is old (e.g., “bird music” in Scholes, 1938) and continues unbroken until the present day, but the discovery of complex, learned vocalizations in marine mammals invalidated this belief. Music often serves to bridge the gap between humans and non-humans. In cultures where people interact intensively with the natural world, music is often used to communicate with non-human animals, whether for practical, spiritual, playful or other purposes. Animal song appears in human music from a wide variety of time periods and cultures, but the way it is used varies enormously. 4įor as long as history, myth, or memory can tell us, human music has been linked with the songs of animals. The book The Origins of Music is based on the workshop “The Origins of Music” in 1997 which treated the roots of music and the interaction of biology and culture in music. ![]() In Biomusicology (established by Wallin in 1991) music is studied from an interdisciplinary perspective scientists are working on the question of what music is and how music evolves. 3 He released a vinyl called “Songs of the Humpback Whale” and in 1979 National Geographic published 10,5 million magazines that included a flexidisc of “Songs of the Humpback Whale”.īiomusicology is a relatively new branch of Musicology. 2Īlthough songlike underwater sounds had been known by oceanographers for many years (and indeed, it has been suggested that singing Mediterranean humpbacks are the origin of the Greek myth of sirens singing) these vocalizations were not definitively linked to whales until described by Roger Payne in 1967. Scott McVay studied at Princeton University which had one of the few sonograph machines capable of printing out the details of sound in a form that could help make sense in the organization of the song. Roger Payne, a conservationist, biologist and research zoologist, was beginning to make a name as the great public voice of whale science and whale conservation around the world. In the 1960s, Watlington handed over his tapes to Dr. The sounds came in clearer than ever before and at this moment he realized that the humpback whales were the source of these sounds. ![]() A few years later, in 1955, Watlington sighted a few whales within fifty feet of the hydrophone. One day Watlington recorded unusual noises, these sounds were quite unfamiliar and were coming in with a breathtaking clarity. The listening device hydrophones, (underwater microphones), played a key part in this detection. He developed systems for detecting the presence of Soviet submarines moving around in the North Atlantic Ocean. During the Soviet Era Cold War, the US Navy stationed engineer Mr.
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