{"id":3251,"date":"2011-09-30T13:10:21","date_gmt":"2011-09-30T19:10:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/earbirding.com\/blog\/?p=3251"},"modified":"2016-11-23T09:55:53","modified_gmt":"2016-11-23T15:55:53","slug":"recyclers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/earbirding.com\/blog\/archives\/3251","title":{"rendered":"Recyclers"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>
Northern Mockingbird, Val Verde County, TX, 4\/30\/2010. Photo by Matthew High (Creative Commons 2.0)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

“Mockingbirds are among the world’s most inspired mimics,” writes composer Andrew May<\/a>.\u00a0 “They learn to imitate other birds’ songs (and other sounds) and incorporate them into their song. Humans, too, imitate and recycle the sounds we hear into our own songs and stories; technologies for recording and manipulating sound have made us even more avid recyclers.”<\/p>\n

I like thinking of mockingbirds and other birds that imitate as “recyclers” rather than “mimics,”\u00a0and\u00a0so do some biologists.\u00a0\u00a0It’s been\u00a0argued that using the term “mimics” to describe mockingbirds is misleading, because in most\u00a0branches of biology, “mimics<\/a>”\u00a0are organisms that take on or use\u00a0the characteristics of other organisms in order to be mistaken for them<\/em>.\u00a0\u00a0The palatable Viceroy butterfly, for example, profits from its similarity to the poisonous Monarch\u00a0only if\u00a0predatory birds can’t tell the\u00a0difference.\u00a0\u00a0It may not be clear why a mockingbird chooses to belt out the song of a Carolina Wren, but everybody agrees that it isn’t trying to pass itself off as a wren; more likely its motives are closer to those of a human hip-hop artist who creates remixed<\/a> songs entirely from samples<\/a>.\u00a0 It’s not mimicking, it’s “appropriating,” to use biologists’ favored term — or “recycling,” to use Andrew May’s analogy.<\/p>\n

But May is not content merely to comment on the artistic motives of mockingbirds.\u00a0 He has turned the tables on the mockingbird and “recycled” its already-remixed song into an artistic statement of his own.<\/p>\n

May, an associate professor of music at the University of North\u00a0Texas, \u00a0has composed a piece of avant-garde classical music called “Recyclers<\/a>” that centers on a recording of a Northern Mockingbird that I made in Big Bend National Park in 2007.\u00a0 I had forgotten that I gave him permission to use the recording until recently, when I stumbled across\u00a0his website devoted to the composition.\u00a0 I’m quite taken with it.<\/p>\n

The part of the piece I find most fascinating is that May didn’t even use traditional musical notation.\u00a0 Instead he overlaid a spectrogram of the mockingbirds’ song directly onto the musical staff:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I’ve often felt that my own musical training was very helpful in learning to read spectrograms,\u00a0and I’ve seen people\u00a0use spectrograms\u00a0of bird songs to\u00a0recreate\u00a0them in musical notation<\/a>, but this is the first time I’ve seen anyone merge spectrograms and musical notation in this way.<\/p>\n

In a live performance, the slowed-down mockingbird sings along on a digital recording while the performers attempt to imitate it, using their ears and their interpretation of the unorthodox score as a guide.\u00a0 It’s not Beethoven, and those unaccustomed to modern classical music may find it unappealing.\u00a0 But I,\u00a0personally, enjoy it quite a bit.\u00a0 You can listen to a 25-minute performance by the Nova Ensemble<\/a> below:<\/p>\nhttp:\/\/cemi.music.unt.edu\/may\/mp3\/recyclers.mp3<\/a><\/audio>\n

As May points out,<\/p>\n

The performance may happen anywhere – a concert hall is not necessarily the best environment. Outdoor spaces (especially those populated with mockingbirds) are encouraged.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Wouldn’t it be wonderful to hear a chamber orchestra inviting the local mockingbird population into a joint performance?\u00a0 Unfortunately, the slowed-down playback\u00a0of the bird sound in May’s recording means it’s unlikely to get a mockingbird’s attention even if performed outdoors — they won’t recognize it as mockingbird song.\u00a0 But knowing mockingbirds,\u00a0it might not matter.\u00a0\u00a0Perhaps they’ll learn something, and repeat a piece of May’s mockingbird-inspired music long after the chamber orchestra is gone.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Andrew May, an associate professor of music at the University of North Texas, has composed a piece of avant-garde classical music called “Recyclers” that centers on a recording of a Northern Mockingbird that I made in Big Bend National Park in 2007.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,229,31],"tags":[231,230],"class_list":["post-3251","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mimicry","category-music","category-spectrograms","tag-mimus-polyglottos","tag-northern-mockingbird"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/earbirding.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3251","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/earbirding.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/earbirding.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/earbirding.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/earbirding.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3251"}],"version-history":[{"count":19,"href":"https:\/\/earbirding.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3251\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5039,"href":"https:\/\/earbirding.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3251\/revisions\/5039"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/earbirding.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3251"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/earbirding.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3251"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/earbirding.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3251"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}