Tuesday, August 15, 2006
Cricket Chorus and other sounds of Nature
This just passed by my desktop.I hadn't heard this particular correlation of all the sounds listed, though often wondered about it...of course, we know of the Cricket Chorus....reminds me of early information on the pentatonic/minor nature of many animal sounds and correlation to indigenous scales....Did not find this on Jeffrey Thompson's site, as indicated, but felt worthy of passing on...pehaps one of you know....Sounds of LifeScientists have discovered an amazing fact about the sounds of the ebb and flow of ocean tides, people's voices, dolphin cries, and bird and cricket chirps. They sound the same! When researchers slow down voice recordings of people, they discover the people's voices sound like the ebb and flow of ocean tides.Then when researchers speed up the recordings, people's voices sound like dolphin cries. Speeded up more, like bird chirps. Even more like crickets. And guess what crickets chirps sound like slowed down? Yep. First like birds. Then dolphins. Then people.But wait! There's more. While examining the recordings of spacecrafts Voyager I and II at the California Institute for Human Science, scientists discover the same sounds! NASA recordings from outer space sound remarkably like ocean sounds, choirs of voices singing, dolphins, birds and crickets.Additionally, sounds produced by the rings of Uranus are virtually identical to those produced by Tibetan bowls.Researchers believe that this similarity is no coincidence. Scientific medical studies are discovering that the sound vibrations of dolphins, Tibetan bowls and choirs have a profound healing effect.Could this be the "collective unconscious" that Carl Jung refers to? A living "collective library" that contains all the knowledge of theUniverse? Stay tuned!- Center for Neuroacoustic Research and The California Institute for Human Science
Tuesday, August 01, 2006
Has there been an "Avian Mozart"?
An interesting study came out in 2003. The gist of it as far as animals go is this:
Schwartz's study casts light on the long-running question of whether animals understand or appreciate music. Despite the apparent abundance of "music" in the natural world -- birdsong, whalesong, wolf howls, synchronized chimpanzee hooting -- previous studies have found that many laboratory animals don't show a great affinity for the human variety of music making.
Marc Hauser and Josh McDermott of Harvard argued in the July issue of Nature Neuroscience that animals don't create or perceive music the way we do. The fact that laboratory monkeys can show recognition of human tunes is evidence, they say, of shared general features of the auditory system, not any specific chimpanzee musical ability. As for birds, those most musical beasts, they generally recognize their own tunes -- a narrow repertoire -- but don't generate novel melodies like we do. There are no avian Mozarts.
But what's been played to the animals, Schwartz notes, is human music. If animals evolve preferences for sound as we do -- based upon the soundscape in which they live -- then their "music" would be fundamentally different from ours. In the same way our scales derive from human utterances, a cat's idea of a good tune would derive from yowls and meows. To demonstrate that animals don't appreciate sounds the way we do, we'd need evidence that they don't respond to "music" constructed from their own sound environment.
For more information on this, CLICK HERE
Comments? Thoughts? Ideas?
Schwartz's study casts light on the long-running question of whether animals understand or appreciate music. Despite the apparent abundance of "music" in the natural world -- birdsong, whalesong, wolf howls, synchronized chimpanzee hooting -- previous studies have found that many laboratory animals don't show a great affinity for the human variety of music making.
Marc Hauser and Josh McDermott of Harvard argued in the July issue of Nature Neuroscience that animals don't create or perceive music the way we do. The fact that laboratory monkeys can show recognition of human tunes is evidence, they say, of shared general features of the auditory system, not any specific chimpanzee musical ability. As for birds, those most musical beasts, they generally recognize their own tunes -- a narrow repertoire -- but don't generate novel melodies like we do. There are no avian Mozarts.
But what's been played to the animals, Schwartz notes, is human music. If animals evolve preferences for sound as we do -- based upon the soundscape in which they live -- then their "music" would be fundamentally different from ours. In the same way our scales derive from human utterances, a cat's idea of a good tune would derive from yowls and meows. To demonstrate that animals don't appreciate sounds the way we do, we'd need evidence that they don't respond to "music" constructed from their own sound environment.
For more information on this, CLICK HERE
Comments? Thoughts? Ideas?
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