All language subtitles for Why.Birds.Sing

The song of the nightingale -

one of the most beguiling sounds
in all nature.

Its haunting musical quality has
inspired generations of artists

and musicians.

The latest is David Rothenberg.

He's a New Age philosopher
and jazz musician,

and he makes the ultimate claim -

that birdsong
doesn't just sound like music,

it IS music.

It has the formal properties
of music

and, like human music,

it's motivated by pleasure.

But his idea that birds sing for
joy has been scorned by scientists,

who favour their own,
more rational explanations.

It's a fight between two ideologies,
with science in one corner
and art in the other.

I think
science and art work different ways
when it comes to birdsong.

Science doesn't have the upper hand
in figuring out

what birdsong is about. One
approach picks up on some things,
misses out on others.

I don't think
David has thought through
as to what the mechanism might be,

if his birds sing for joy.

He's just making
some unscientific declarations

that insult my birds,
and indirectly, that bothers me.

This is a leap
right into the eagle's nest

of disagreement and suspicion,

and we have some scientists
who think I'm just an interloper,

playing music with the careful
subjects of their research.

Now, Pied Piper David
is on a mission to show
music is as important as science

in our understanding
of why birds sing.

The morning chorus is
just pure joy, really, isn't it?

You hear that bursting into life...

Almost like a piece of music,

it starts quietly and then builds up.

It's never going to be
the same performance twice.

Pretty good, really.

I love to wake up
and hear that outside,

and it's deafening sometimes.

It really sounds like they're
singing for the sake of it.

Of all the sounds found in nature,
none has proved
as bewitching as birdsong.

Dogs may bark and cows may moo,

but it's birds that have inspired
poets and composers.

And David Rothenberg has taken
the notion that birdsong is musical

to its extreme.

I believe that birdsong isn't
just like music, it IS music.

Science struggles to define
exactly what music is.

But David thinks he knows.

Music
is a bunch of sounds put together

that need to be performed
in a specific way

where the meaning
is just in the performance -

you can't say what each part means.

But it's really
the root of my belief

that each species has its own
kind of music, its own aesthetic.

Not surprisingly, the scientists
scoff at his aesthetic notions.

They believe that birds sing for
two basic evolutionary reasons -

and making music
has got nothing to do with it.

Virtually everybody
in the scientific world

believes that birds sing primarily
to attract mates and repel rivals.

David doesn't deny this,
but for him,

science can't explain
the fact that some birds
sing more than they need to,

even when the mating season is over
and there are no rivals around.

It's this that makes him think
they might actually sing
because they enjoy it.

Why shouldn't they be singing
for pleasure? Who are we to assume

that this kind of animal
doesn't experience joy?

Birds sing because they're alive.

They have a million reasons to sing,

just like we do.

I think it's something they can do,

something they can do well,

and they enjoy it - why not?

David is now setting out
on a long summer journey to explore
and draw out the musical qualities

of birds.

He will meet fellow obsessives...

bizarre musicians...

and strip down for his art.

HE COOS

At the end of his trip,
he will be granted an audience with
the bigwigs of birdsong science

to try and gain a little respect.

Thoroughly wacky! Thoroughly wacky?

David's journey began in 2002,

when he went to Pittsburgh Aviary,
just to see what would happen

if he played to the birds.

What occurred on that day
was a revelation to him.

I really didn't expect
much to happen,

but there were was a particular
moment when I got the idea

that maybe there was something
to birdsong worth investigating.

There I was, wandering with
my clarinet through the aviary,

and one particular bird -
a white-crested laughing thrush -

really seemed to respond
to what I was doing,
like he was jamming along with me.

The more he blew, the more it sang,

and the more he was convinced
it was duetting with him.

I assumed, actually, that he was
either thinking I was a female bird

or a potential rival,
but the way he was responding

was very jamming-like -
very much like music.

That was what I didn't expect.

This inter-species jamming session
so excited David

that he embarked on a quest
to commune with as many birds
as possible.

Along the way, he wrote a book
about why he thinks
birds are making music.

Why Birds Sing has outsold
many of the scientific books
you'd find on the same shelves.

Clearly there are thousands of us
who find his claims not just
credible, but deeply appealing.

All right. Nice to meet you.

David Rothenberg
lives in upstate New York,

where his day job is trying to teach
philosophy to engineering students.

On the side, he composes avant-garde
music inspired by the natural world.

.. A wood thrush, which you could
have heard here a few months ago.
You won't hear them now.

But he doesn't stop there.
In his garden studio,

he spends hours studying
the musicality of birds,
with the help of sonograms.

These are visual representations
of the frequency and rhythm
of birdsong.

A sonogram is a way to objectively
graph how high or low a sound is,

against how long it is, when you
hear it. You can look at it,

and thereby have an accurate
representation of what the sound is.

David has found
all sorts of similarities between
birdsong and human musical form.

To human ears, the wood warbler
appears to end its song
with a musical accelerando...

..the robin
sings swelling crescendos...

..and the thrush,
delicate diminuendos.

There are technical similarities
too.

The hermit thrush can sing
in a pentatonic musical scale,

used in Far Eastern music.

And the wood thrush is able to sing
in a diatonic scale, the foundation
of Western classical music.

With one particular birdsong,
that of a veery...

.. David has found an even closer
connection, by slowing it down
to a tenth of its normal speed.

You're going to see something
that looks kind of similar,

a little stretched out,

but what you hear
is the same structure
brought down into the human scale.

It's hard not to think
it's somehow musical.

So there's rhythm, there's
organisation, there's patterns.

It's really musical stuff going on.

For science, the fact that birdsong
can be annotated musically

doesn't prove a thing.

I'm not sure that I would want
to use the word music

in relation to birdsong,

because human music is qualitatively
different from birdsong.

I don't think birds use scales
in the same sense as we do,
or anything like that.

You don't want to mix up
two different things which are
very distinct from one another.

Some birdsongs are beautiful
to our ears, some are not.

And we have to realise that
these birds are hearing differently
than we are in the first place.

For the science world,

David's ideas are just woolly
thinking, but he's determined
to prove them wrong.

He's travelling to the UK

to spread his musical gospel.

His book is beginning to irritate
British avian scientists.

Their work is based on rigorous
scientific research,

producing a rational answer
to explain why birds sing.

When we ask the question, "Why do
birds sing?", the two big ones,

I think, are what causes it
and what its function is.

Professor Peter Slater has been
studying vocal communication in
birds and mammals for over 30 years.

One of his recent publications was
Ambient Noise, Motor Fatigue And
Serial Redundancy In Chaffinch Song.

What causes it - things
like hormones, time of day,

whether it's a nice day or not - all
sorts of things that lead the bird
to do it, that cause it to do it.

But one can also be asking the
question of what function it has -
why does the bird do it?

What's the point of it?
Does it attract females?

With the majority of songbirds,
the male does most of the singing
in order to attract the best female.

The female chooses to mate
with the male
she thinks has the best song.

This is known as sexual selection.

There's plenty of evidence to show
the link between songs and sex.

Scientists have recorded
correlations

between peak song activity and
peak egg laying.

Sexual selection

is evolutionary forces,

which determine how males develop

elaborate signals or ornaments,

such as birdsong,

or the long tail of a peacock,

and those develop because females
prefer to mate with males
that possess those traits.

Some birds
have very sexually selected songs,

such as warblers or nightingales -
they have songs
which are very complex,

and females choose males
which have the most complex songs.

And do female birds ever sing? In
some species, female birds do sing -

for example, the European starling,
the females sing, though
not as much as the males -

and in some species, they duet.

Female and male will duet together
to defend their territory.

The defence of territory
is the other main evolutionary
function of birdsong.

In a classic experiment,

scientists discovered male birds
showed aggressive behaviour towards
speakers playing rival birdsong.

So there we are - these are the two
principal reasons why birds sing.

Birds sing primarily
to attract mates and repel rivals.

But what of David's insistence
that some birds sing much fancier
and longer songs than they need to?

It's a useful thing
to have a very elaborate song -

just like, perhaps, human beings,
they don't like to be bored
in conversation.

Females have a bias towards
perceiving a complex signal

and prefer those males
which have complex songs.

There's this awful thing
called habituation.

If you tell the same funny story many
times, the audience stops laughing.

If you sing the same song many, many
times, the female may habituate
to it and stop being interested.

So a male that produces
a really varied repertoire

is likely to attract a female more
than one with less of a repertoire.

We know this is the case
in a number of species of bird -

the more varied your repertoire, the
more likely you are to get a female.

As soon as you say that a song is
more beautiful than it has to be,

or that the male is singing
more than he has to,

I think you're insulting that female
who has directed, silently,

this whole birdsong feast

that we listen to all summer long.

So for the scientists, birdsong's
function is easily explained.

It's all about sex, territory

and passing your genes on
to the next generation.

I'm not sure David Rothenberg
is asking any of these questions.

I think his major interest
is why birdsong is beautiful,
and why it's musical.

I think they're more questions
about human beings
than they are about birds.

I think we know
far more about why birds sing
than we know about why humans sing.

# If all the young ladies
were blackbirds and thrushes

# If all the young ladies
were blackbirds and thrushes

# Then all the young men
would go beating the bushes

# Fol-de-dol diddle-dol

# Diddle-dol-day

# If all the young ladies
were ducks on the water

# If all the young ladies
were ducks on the water

# Then all the young men
would go swimming in after

# Fol-de-dol diddle-dol

# Diddle-dol-day

# If all the young ladies
were rushes a-growing

# If all the young ladies
were rushes a-growing

# Then all the young men
would get scythes and go mowing

# Fol-de-dol diddle-dol

# Diddle-dol-day. #

For now, David's wings have been
clipped by the scientific community.

So he's off to look
for moral support from Simon Barnes,

Times sports writer and author
of How To Be A Bad Birdwatcher.

So where are we, Simon?
We're out in East Suffolk,

which is a very decent area
for birds -

an area that's mostly arable farming
and rough pasture.

We've a nice bit of copse
in front of us,

where we get a few songbirds
every year.

Why do you think birds sing?

Yes! I... well, I loved
the core point of your book,

that there is no evolutionary reason
why birdsong should be beautiful.

And I was absolutely enthralled
by that,

because I've always loved birdsong

for the magic of it and
the complexity of it and, of course,

for the beauty of it.

I don't understand why scientists

tend to believe that an animal,

in fulfilling its nature,

somehow should be far away
from something like pleasure
or enjoying the process.

Why is that more scientific than...?

I... I find that strange.

I mean, to talk about the
emotional life of animals, or even
the cultural transmission in animals,

puts you on dangerous ground.
I understand by anthropomorphism
because I'm an anthropos - a man.

That's how you understand things.

But scientists are terrified of that
and shy away from it,

and try and put... I mean, there are
aspects of life that don't work

in charts and pie charts
and bar graphs and so forth.

Boosted by Simon's fervour,

David returns to his musical quest,

determined to discover
the holy grail of human-bird duets.

He's off to the Thames Estuary
to recreate a piece of history.

In 1924,
the BBC organised what was to be
its first ever outside broadcast.

It featured the acclaimed cellist
and muse of Edward Elgar,
Beatrice Harrison.

What was unique about this broadcast
was that Harrison set up the cello
in her Surrey garden

and was recorded duetting with that
most romantic of all songbirds,

the nightingale.

The nightingale is the perfect bird
for David to test his musical ideas,

as it sings its repertoire of over
300 songs alone in the evening,

when many other species are quiet.

CELLO AND NIGHTINGALE SONG PLAY

David has been alerted
to a wood in Kent

where he hopes
to repeat Beatrice Harrison's
human-nightingale collaboration.

And this is
quite an ancient woodland,

and it's home to a particularly
special bird, the nightingale.

We've got
about 15 pairs of nightingales
breeding in the woodland here.

Do you think we might hear some
today?
of nightingale song a minute ago.

It's a very rich, mellow song,

and as we get
towards the end of the day,

the song will be a bit more
in stark relief.

To complete the recreation,
cellist Andrea Hess
is to don Beatrice's robes

and play her repertoire
in an attempt to draw out and duet
with the elusive songbird.

That's it. That's more or less it.

I'm very curious
about birds and intonation,

because they never seem to sing
out of tune.

How do they do it?

Musicians struggle always
to be perfectly in tune,

and birds do it so effortlessly.

Not to be left out,

David has also dressed in Beatrice's
magical robes, as part of the
plan to lure out the nightingale.

Meanwhile, in tribute to Beatrice
Harrison's most famous patron,

Andrea plays some Elgar
to warm her and the birds up.

Initially, there's no response
from the nightingale.

She has now been playing

for nearly two hours, and
Andrea is ready to put down her bow

and give up the ghost,
when suddenly...

TWITTERING RESPONSE

The nightingale is actually
responding to the cello.

What I'm really trying to say is
birds make music -

they're singing pieces of music,

and that we cannot explain it away
by just saying what it's for.

Take the song of the nightingale -
many different phrases,

many different rhythms. When
it comes to complicated birdsongs,

scientists have been counting
the wrong things. So far,
what scientists tend to do

is count the number of different
syllables and sounds you hear.

But they stop there.

What I'm interested in
is how they're put together
in a structured way,

like a piece of music.

MUSIC: Cello Concerto in E minor,
Opus 85, by Edward Elgar

I think the creative potential
of birdsong as musical material

is endless. In each generation,

we have different ideas
of how human music works.

We're going to hear
different things as being musical.

I think today, with the world
of electronic music we live in,

strange sounds
being increasingly appreciated,

a song like the nightingale's
opens up new possibilities for us.

It starts to sound
like a DJ scratching records.

And these rhythms
are not limited to the music world.

The nightingale
has also inspired the rustic poetry

of John Clare.

Clare brought an almost forensic
accuracy to the depiction of
the nightingale song in his poems.

It is this blending of science
and art that has drawn David
to Northamptonshire

to meet poet and Clare expert,
Paul Farley.

So, Paul, here we are wandering
through John Clare country.

Yes. This is the wood where
Clare came to listen to the
nightingales sing - the very wood.

Birdsong seems to have been
quite important for Clare.

I think so. Clare's very different

from the other Romantic poets.
He's often routinely bundled in

and called a Romantic, but in fact
there's lots of differences
between Clare's poetry

and that of somebody like, say,
John Keats.

Um, Clare was much more interested
in not just the song of the bird,

but the whole universe surrounding
it, its habitat,

a description of the bird's nest
and its eggs.

In a funny kind of way,
he puts the song of the bird
back into the bird's mouth.

The more I listened

And the more each note
seemed sweeter than before

And aye so different was the strain

She'd scarce repeat the note again

Chew chew, chew chew

And higher still

Cheer cheer, cheer cheer

More loud and shrill

Cheer up, cheer up, cheer up

And dropped low

Tweet tweet, jug jug jug

And stopped.

John Clare's birdsong-inspired
poetry was almost more
scientific than Romantic,

combining phonetic and poetical
language, rather like an early
literary form of the sonogram.

Clare was way ahead
of both scientists
and composers and musicians.

He was turning human language
towards nightingale sounds

when he wrote down in his notebook,
"Chew cheer cheer cheer chee chee."

He really took this song seriously
long before music was able to do,

long before science was able to do,

because scientists would not take
the study of birdsong very seriously
until they could record it,

and then print it out and turn it
into data to be rigorously analysed.

In fact, the history of
the scientific study of birdsong

has shown ever more accurate ways
of quantifying it.

Well, originally, birdsong
was studied very informally,

very qualitatively, because we
didn't have the equipment to record
the song nor to analyse it.

Now we can measure frequencies
very precisely.

We can measure rhythms
very precisely.

We can measure form very precisely.

There are a lot of tools we can use
which allow us to quantify,

which is one of the major things
about science. If you quantify,

then you can answer scientific
questions to a much greater extent

than if you just wave your arms
around and don't count things.

One man who knows a thing or two -
or three - about counting is
Professor Donald Kroodsma.

A wise owl of birdsong science,

there is little he doesn't know
about collecting and recording
birdsong data.

Kroodsma lives
amongst his beloved birds
in the forests of Massachusetts.

To capture these songs,
I love to use what's called
a parabolic microphone.

It's just a precision instrument
that takes sounds and directs them

off this parabola
back to the microphone.

It's like when you aim that parabola
at a bird and put the headphones on,

suddenly you are there.

The bird is right there,
singing in your face,

so loud and crisp, and it's magical.

There are about
4,600 species of songbirds.

It's a remarkable number,
a remarkably successful group.

Some sing beautiful, varied songs,

some sing the same little phrase
again and again.

Almost everything to do with
birdsong varies
from one species to another.

Oh, one of my favourite birdsongs,
I think, is the wood thrush,

to slow down, to really get
a feeling for what's going on
in these birds,

because it gives you a glimpse of
what's going on in those voice boxes,

as the bird is actually singing.

We humans have just one voice box,
and it's at the top of our windpipe.

But birds, extraordinarily,
can sing a duet with themselves,

because they have two voice boxes -

down at the bottom of the windpipe,
it branches off to the two lungs,

and at the top of each branch is an
independently controlled voice box.

But when you slow that song down,

you see those two voice boxes
at work.

The double voice box
certainly impresses the ladies -

yet more evidence for the role
of song in attracting females.

It's the female, I'm convinced,
who's doing all the listening,

and making decisions,

because you have all these females
paired to males,

and they're paired monogamously.

But yet there's so much more going
on in these monogamous pairings,

because once you do the DNA
fingerprinting of the babies
in the nest,

you realise that these females
are mating not only with their
own social monogamous partner,

but they're also mating with
other males in the neighbourhood.

In this clip from The Life Of Birds,

two male sparrows, Alpha and Beta,
are vying for the attentions

of one female.

But she has got her eye cocked.

Beta is still in the hedge,
calling quietly to her.

She joins him, and now, while
Alpha is preoccupied with feeding,

she and Beta get together.

Twirling her tail is an invitation,
and in a split second, they mate.

So why do males sing?

Well, I think they sing,
and they sing so much more than
we would think would be necessary -

they sing because
females are always listening.

Donald Kroodsma is one of
the best-known field biologists

working on birdsong,

and most of his work is collecting
song in the field and analysing it.

I would say that the one thing
missing from Don's analysis is

he just hasn't given music
that much thought,

and I think
if you take music seriously,

you will then take birdsong
more seriously.

I'm not sure anybody knows
what music is!

It's, er... I suppose as a scientist,
I might say,

well, it's any series, any pattern
of sounds that strikes us
as somewhat pleasing,

but not all human music is pleasing
to me,

so I don't know what human music is.

I really don't know what bird music
is, or whether birdsong IS music.

David's work has this veneer
of rigour, because he talks
about scientific work,

and yet to me it's unscientific,

and in that sense it undermines the
agenda many of us have, to make the
world more scientifically literate.

I'm interested in birdsong as music.

Why do so many birdsongs sound
musical to our human ears?

# Una verdad se inventa

# Con suma precision

# Y la labor inmensa

# De la imaginacio-on... #

The song La Verdad,
which means The Truth,

well, actually, its lyrics don't
have pretty much to do with birds,

but the way I build up the music,
it has.

# Yo no quiero desganos

# Ni falta de pasion

# Yo no quiero estar en manos

# De un gran simulado-or

# No-o... #

'I was playing that song
outside my house,'

and these birds sang there,
like, "Qua-ka-ra-ka....!"

And that was a long, long time ago,
and that day,

I said, I want this cascade,
like a waterfall of birds.

I started to loop different lengths
of music,

so I have a pattern going one loop,

and a different pattern
going in another loop.

# Ka-ka, ka-ka-ka-ka-ka... #

SECOND LOOP OF SOUND DEVELOPS
WITH SCAT SINGING

Music is everywhere.

We live in an ocean of sound.

I was playing this show in Italy
on top of a hill one evening,

and I heard
this very cool brand-new part,

then I realised I was singing a duet
with this little owl.

And I thought, I could die right now,
cos life does not get better
than this!

I'm singing a duet with an owl!

JARVIS COCKER:
It's kind of like the original
Andean music, birdsong, isn't it?

It's like it generates itself.

I mean, I suppose as a listener,

you affect it a little bit,
as in if you make too much noise,
they'll shut up and fly away.

But if you sit there, and
are quiet, then it just happens.

David knows he'll eventually
have to face the music
with the science world,

but before he does, he's biding
his time with a kindred spirit.

HE WHISTLES

In New Jersey, Joe Sodano has been
impersonating birds since he was 4.

He combines this hobby with running
a business transporting turkeys.

OK, who's going to market?
HE GOBBLES AT THEM

Your turn, buddy.

It's your turn, buddy.

It's your turn.
Somebody wants to eat you.

So what kind of birds
can you imitate?

Oh...

a lot of birds.

I love the cardinal, but this time
of year, they're not responding,

cos they're mating. The cardinal -
he's a beautiful bird, the cardinal.

He goes, like...

PIERCING WHISTLE

Then we have the northern
mockingbird, which I love.

We've got the American robin.

He goes, like, "Hello, Mr Robin!"
"Hello!" he says.

Joe's not the only one
in his household who can sing.

What's your favourite birdsong?

Birdsong? Um...

.. like...

I love can-can.

HE TWEETS THE CAN-CAN

'Birds sing because they're happy.

'The world is going to be
a very, very dark place
if the birds aren't singing. '

CAN-CAN CONTINUES WITH BACKING

'My whistle,
it'll pierce you sometimes.

'People complain, that have
hearing aids, that it kind of does
something to their hearing aid.

'I've had a few complaints. '

Humans imitating birds
is no rare phenomenon.

Astonishingly,
the process can work in reverse.

Good heavens! What's the time?

Who's a pretty boy, then?

Say hello.

'Ello!

SCOTTISH ACCENT:
A bird in the hand
is worth two in the bush.

WOLF WHISTLE

Give us a kiss!

Da-da-da-da-ra!

But perhaps
the most extraordinary example
of a bird learning human sounds

is that of the superb lyre bird,
native of Australia.

It's the daddy of all mimics.

To persuade females to come close
and admire his plumes,

he sings the most complex song
he can manage,

and he does that by copying
the songs of all the other birds
he hears around him,

such as the kookaburra.

Even the original is fooled.

He also, in his attempt
to outsing his rivals,

incorporates other sounds
that he hears in the forest.

That was a camera shutter.

And again.

And now,
a camera with a motor drive.

And that's a car alarm.

The sounds of foresters
and their chainsaws working nearby.

What the lyre bird is doing
is called vocal learning.

This is the ability of an animal

to learn and reproduce a new sound,
and it makes them pretty special,

because very few other animals
can do it.

David's decided to go to New York

to explore the similarities between
bird and human vocal learning.

He's meeting
Professor Ofer Tchernichovski,

a man so obsessed
with vocal learning

that he's spent a solid 11 years
studying the song of just one
bird species - the zebra finch.

Ofer and his research team keep
50 breeding pairs of zebra finches

that provide a constant supply
of little learners.

In each one of those nest boxes

you can see there are eggs.

Those are eggs that were just laid
by the female. Once they hatch,

we are going to separate the father

and take the mother with the chicks
to another colony area

for mothers and babies only.

We are doing that

because the female zebra finches,
they do not sing.

So those young animals are going to
grow up without hearing natural song

until we decide to let them hear it.

Zebra finches are popular
with birdsong scientists

because they breed like rabbits.
From being an egg to laying an egg

takes just 90 days.

So with four generations in a year,
Ofer gets answers about
song learning very quickly.

When they're 35 days old, Ofer
transfers his baby male finches

to a soundproof box.

Here, he uses models
to train his birds to sing.

You see this young male...

and you can see
that there is a plastic figure

just there, in front of a speaker.

And you can see two keys right there,
on the left and on the right.

Occasionally he is pecking
on those keys, and he is doing that

in order to hear song playback
that comes from this direction

where we see a figure of a bird.

As soon as this young finch
pecks on a button,

it hears the song...

relaxes, and begins to fall asleep.

Every noise the zebra finches make
is recorded,

and 10,000 gigabytes of data
have been analysed.

Ofer believes
he's starting to understand how
the zebra finches learn to sing.

Like humans,

he's found they need teachers,

regular practice,
and frequent naps.

Also like us, they have
a critical period for learning.

They can learn only during a very
narrow window of their development.

When they are about 35 days old,
they have already started to sing,

very faint songs, called subsongs.
At that time,

if they hear a song of an adult male,
which they've never heard,

they can actually start imitating it.

If we just wait 30 more days,
they cannot do very well.

If we wait another 20 days,
they can hardly imitate at all.

And Ofer sees a human connection to
his experience with zebra finches.

We are very interested - what is it

in their sensitive period
that is so special,
which also makes them similar to us?

Human infants can acquire
new language and learn it,

and acquire it with
no apparent effort and no accent.

You can hear that I have an accent.
My daughters don't.

At the beginning
of the window of learning,

the birds make random sounds,
just like babies do.

You can see that in this very young
bird, at about day 35,

he was never trained with anything...

But as they quickly mature, Ofer
has discovered that the birds
favour specific sounds,

that appear as clusters
on the graphs. Not only that,

they also start singing them
in a set order, just like a child
turning noises into words.

But just because zebra finch
and human learning
develop along similar lines,

it doesn't mean the birds know
what they're doing.

It doesn't mean the birds have
consciousness, and it doesn't mean
they think their songs beautiful.

So you've listened
to these baby male zebra finches,

found all these clusters,
you've drawn this graph
and all these lines.

Can science address the question
of why birdsong sounds beautiful
to human ears?

I personally wouldn't like
to live in a world where
we could really measure beauty.

For me, the fact that I can observe
those clusters shown up,

I just observe more beauty.

It doesn't explain the beauty,
but I can see it.

In art, people create beauty.

In science, it's less talented
people, who can only discover beauty.

The beauty of birdsong has inspired
artists and musicians for centuries.

Composers such as Haydn,
Ravel and Beethoven

have incorporated the sound into
some of their most famous works.

Music is essentially
an abstract art form,

but, having said that,

obviously everyday sounds
feed into the compositional process

and so I think if you are a composer
with an acute ear,

little things will feed in,
and you'll play with them,

just as, in a way,
one quotes earlier composers.

So you quote the sounds around you.

Beethoven, in the Pastoral Symphony,

is expressing, I think,
the serenity of nature,

and he decorates a cadence point
in the slow movement

with a little cadenza
for three birds.

There's the nightingale,
which has this oscillation...

.. which gets gradually faster
and turns into a trill,

then there's the cuckoo...

.. and the quail.

It's very fascinating

that as we got into the 20th century
in musical history,

so we had a complete shift

in terms of birdsong.

Up until then, on the whole,

composers had imitated, and mainly
imitated birds that we recognise -

cuckoos or whatever,
or pigeons and things like that,
a cooing sound.

With Messiaen, we got a key change.

Olivier Messiaen
was one of the most important
composers of the 20th century.

His music was harmonically
colourful, rhythmically complex,

and in his later work,
hugely influenced by birdsong.

However, unlike
previous classical composers,

Messiaen actually went
into the fields and forests
of his native France to listen to

and musically notate birdsong.

His belief was
that birds were musical,

but that they were musical because
God had put them into creation

to be musicians.

They were the real musicians of...
of God's creation,
rather than human beings.

Peter Hill studied with Messiaen
and has recorded many of his works.

When I studied with Messiaen,

he always confessed, "I'm not
a scientist - I write birdsong,

"really, because I love birds,
and they enchant me."

He worked them into a whole series
of very remarkable pieces.

The most famous, probably, is
for piano - Catalogue d'Oiseaux.

One of the most beautiful pieces
in Messiaen's Catalogue d'Oiseaux,

which he wrote in the mid-1950s,
is Le Traquet Stapazin,

which translates
as the Black-Eared Wheatear,

and he's imagining
a kind of medley of birds here

in the darkness before dawn
on a midsummer morning.

First of all there's the ortolan
bunting, a flute-like sound,

Messiaen says, and then
the spectacled warbler,

which has a kind of
chattering effect,

but always over this harmony
of E major...

And then that's interrupted
by a harsh sea bird out to sea,

so we know we're by the sea -

it's a herring gull...

And then a great crow...

Then you get the gentler birds...

That's the spectacled warbler again,
and then the goldfinch.

In the world that Messiaen creates
from birdsong, it is very angular,

and it doesn't fit into
our ordinary concept of harmony.

But that's why it's sort of unique,
and in a way it's truer to birdsong

than, actually, Beethoven was,
or Mozart or Haydn,

because they were trying to fit it
in to a pre-existing harmony.

In one way, birdsong is the most
perfect music, because it exists
in a kind of vacuum of its own.

It's unsullied, it's totally pure.

In another way, it has nothing to do
with music as we know it.

But one of the great challenges
any artist faces

is to bring these things together -

to bring the sounds of nature

into the constructs
that we call Western music.

Rising to that challenge,

two modern-day Messiaens have come
together at Peter Gabriel's
Real World Studios in Wiltshire

to work on a unique composition.

They are musician Richard Evans
and producer Simon Emmerson,

who, as well as leading
the Afro-Celt Sound System,

is also an obsessive birdwatcher.

David has sent Simon and Richard
a selection of bird sounds

around which they'll create
a brand-new piece of music.

We started by building up
the rhythm track

and the obvious place
was at the bottom end,

a place where a bass drum
or a bass beat would fall,

so we put a bittern on beat one...

LOW BOOM

.. which is this marshland bird
that skulks around

in the fringes of the reeds.

OK. We then wanted a back beat,

um, and a stonechat has a sound

of a stone being hit together,

so we bring in the stonechat...

.. so you've got a basic groove,
one two.

We put a woodpecker in now,
just to act as a kind of woodblock.

That's the woodpecker,

um, tapping away... on a tree.

It's not doing the drumming.

Here comes the hoopoe.

So there's your basic rhythm track.

We can mix and vary these.

So we needed, like, a lead vocal.

The, er, most...

appealingly vocal we've got,
I think, is the eider duck,

which sounds a little bit like
Frankie Howerd, the English comedian,

guesting on Carry On Birdwatching.

Oo-ooh!

Oo-ooh!

Oo-ooh!

Oo-ooh!

And that is eider duck,
it's not Frankie Howerd.

And finally,

um...

OK, let's just stop all that.

The day before,
Peter Gabriel recorded some vocals,

based on the song
of the butcher bird,

so-called
for impaling its victims on thorns
before devouring them.

Peter Gabriel came to my studio
at home

and he tried to sing
as closely as he possibly could

to, um, the butcher bird song.

So what we'd do was take
each phrase and loop it up,

so the butcher bird would be heard
12 times, and he'd just
sing and sing and sing

until he'd learnt the little melody

and got as close as possibly
he could to the exact melody.

And then we'd edit together
something that was exactly
the same. So from this...

.. we ended up with him...

What Peter really wanted

was us to put a process on it where,
rather than him just singing along

exactly with the bird,
he wants it to sound

as if his voice is slowly morphing
and changing into the sound of
the butcher bird and back again.

We haven't done that yet.
That's tomorrow's job,

and it will be fairly difficult,
I think, to achieve that.

David will add his own contribution
to the bird composition
in a few days' time.

But in the meantime, in Germany,
his moment of truth has arrived.

All year, David's ideas on birdsong
and its musical qualities

have been ruffling the feathers
of the world's
leading avian scientists.

Now, they've flocked to Berlin
for a conference.

There's one big question
that I hope to talk to
some of these scientists about.

Very few scientists
have taken seriously the question
of what birds are singing.

Why do so many birds sing
elaborate, very beautiful,
musically constructed songs,

when what they're trying to do
with these songs
is something rather simple -

attract mates, defend territories?

They'd be a lot better off
using some simple, clear song.

It's the last day of the conference
and in Berlin's botanical gardens,

it's high noon for David.

Three of the world's leading avian
scientists have reluctantly agreed
to meet him. Between them,

they have 97 years' experience
studying birdsong.

Do you think that a musician has any
role to help understand birdsong?

Or are we just too human-centred
and misguided to be of any use?

Well?

What do you think? I think
a musician can help to describe
the beauty of birdsong -

describe birdsong
in an artistic sense.

I mean, scientists haven't got a
complete stranglehold on birdsong,

but if you want to understand
birdsong from a scientific
point of view,

you've got to approach it
from a scientific point of view,

and I personally don't really think
that people from the arts

can help us to any great degree
in that endeavour. Well said.

I would not tell an artist
how he should listen to birdsong,

and I think in that same way,
it bothers a little

to have an artist, a musician,
telling us, "Oh, you should be
listening in this way."

But David really isn't telling us
how to listen - he's just making
some unscientific declarations

that insult my birds and indirectly,
you know, that bothers me.

Birds sing because they have to -
they must, this is what it means
to be a bird.

That's a completely tautological
argument, isn't it? Not entirely.

"They must"?! That's no scientific
explanation.
is the same in all these cases,

but the songs are very diverse,
different and interesting
in themselves.

It has...

All behaviour patterns have to work.
Yeah. Song has to work.

But music is a totally
human conception.

I don't understand why you want
to impose this word on something
wonderful like birdsong.

Because it helps...
You then focus on the song itself.

Science focuses on the function
of the song too often,

and not on the song in itself.

I think you're being anthropomorphic.
I don't understand why you want
to use the word music.

Assuming that birds are like people,

in any sort of sense,
is a very dangerous thing to do.

From the evolutionary point of view,
our nearest common ancestor was some
reptile crawling around in sludge!

You're not likely to find anything
in common as far as vocal
communication is concerned.

But I also think
it's anthropomorphic
to count all the parts of the song

and really be so quantifying
about it, and stop there.

If you really want to do science,
you have to count, you have to do
things that are quantitative,

and set up experiments and
hypotheses... Why not count...?

Speculating on the basis of one
or two animals is not interesting.

Why not count the rhythms,
the shape, the form -

not just the number of differences?
That's just the beginning.

Scientists don't like it when
non-scientists criticise them.

They say, "How dare you?
We're not musicians,
we're not going to criticise music.

"You should leave us scientists
alone. We have enough problems! This
work's hard enough to do as it is,

"and you're making it
more difficult."

I think this is thoroughly wacky.
Wacky? Thoroughly.

Do you think most birds would
imitate or respond to human beings
who would whistle to them?

If you say the birds are responding
to music as a special sound,
special human sound,

as a scientist I step back and say,
"Wait a minute."

You're saying they respond
to a special kind of sound,

but do you have a control sound?

When we wanted to get birds to sing
in the laboratory, we'd try music,

we'd try everything. What
worked was a vacuum cleaner. Turn
the vacuum cleaner on, they sang.

David is a philosopher
and he's a musician.

So he's looking at birdsong
from a very different angle
to your average scientist.

And he has, to my mind, ignored
quite a large body of evidence,

gleaned scientifically,

by people setting up hypotheses
and testing them and being sure
they had good sample sizes,

and doing all the things
us scientists have to do.

We're very cautious people,
scientists. I think
he finds that very frustrating.

Science doesn't have, you know,
the upper hand in figuring out
what birdsong is about.

They have one approach. It picks up
on some things, misses out others.

In a sense, it's science and arts - a
different approach, different angles.

He's an interesting man.
He's got very interesting ideas.

But he's not a scientist.

What would it take for me to become
a scientist? Complete retraining.

Science is the art of collecting
interesting numbers,

and so I would ask you
to collect some numbers,

analyse them, and tell us what
that tells you about the world.

David has failed to convince
the scientists

that his ideas are worth taking
seriously,

and the wall between their world
and his is as high as ever.

# Loving you

# Is easy cos you're beautiful

# Making love with you

# Is all I wanna do

# La-la-la-la-la

# La-la-la-la-la

# La-la-la-la-la... #

Feeling rejected, he's retreated
back to the welcoming embrace
of art - a world free of numbers,

but rich in imagination.

He's agreed to take part
in the ultimate experiment
in anthropomorphism.

He's going to become a song thrush
in an art installation.

The work is to be created
by conceptual artist Marcus Coates.

Coates has dedicated most of his
video and performance installations

to exploring the relationships
between humans and animals.

Now, in his most ambitious work
to date,

he's creating a video
dawn chorus, sung by humans.

David is to be the final bird
in his collection.

I developed this technique,

probably about seven years aho,

of recreating birdsong,
but using human voices.

This is a re-enactment
of a dawn chorus,

where each bird will be sung
by a different singer.

David today will be singing
like a song thrush.

So I'm not like waking up
under covers?

No, I think you're just hanging out
in this dark space.

We've got some fantastic recordings,

and we slowed down the birdsong.

Double-sided...

'They have a little ear piece
and they sing along with it,
and I film them singing this,

'and we speed the film up
to the original bird speed,

'and what you in effect get is
an extremely accurate rendition
of birdsong. '

'We're also using human habitats,
and David has said that he spends
a lot of time in hotels,

'and it's a kind of habitual place
for him. David's sitting here,

'in his underpants -

'he's in a very human environment. '

All right, let's run.

Starting to play... now.

Oh! Oh! Oh-oh-oh...!

'This project is more about, rather
than us projecting our emotions

'and our kind of needs onto birds,

'it's kind of the other way round,
and we are becoming birds.

'And there is that element
in all of us

'that wants to believe
that birds enjoy singing,

'and they're singing because
they're in love, or they're joyous,

'or they're just singing because
they're pleased to be alive. '

'It wasn't just the song that became
very accurate when we sped it up.

'Also, the people's
movements and their mannerisms -

'it's almost as if,
if you sped humans up ten times,

'they'd become much more like birds. '

David's experience of being a bird
and his brush-off from the science
world has drawn him back

to what ignited his passion
in the first place -
duetting with living birds.

At the Bronx Zoo in New York,

he's recruited another artist
inspired by birdsong.

Like David, musician Michael Pestel
has a bit of previous,

duetting with birds.

On this occasion, Pestel has
brought along his pride and joy -

the Bird Machine.

The Bird Machine
is an evolving project.

It's never really finished.

In fact, each time I play it,
it's slightly different.

The core of this instrument is
a recorder - a bass recorder in C -

which is designed according to
the square design of organ pipes -

Renaissance organ pipes.

BURBLING MUSIC WITH WHISTLES

Other sounds are, you know,
your generic seagull...

SQUAWKING

.. European blackbird...

Then you've got the wind wand.

Well, of course,
it's always a bit of a hit or miss
when you go into aviaries.

One tries to draw them out,

and in the process,
draw oneself out.

The response is intuitive,
and that's enough for me.

I'm certainly not approaching this
as a scientist.

When there is a dialogue,
it's an intensely satisfying one.

Despite the best efforts of
Michael, David and the Bird Machine,

they've all failed
to get a response.

However, in another part of the zoo,
David has left the best
for himself -

the white-crested laughing thrush,

the bird that inspired him
in Pittsburgh four years ago.

Both the male and female
of this species duet together.

They are the Sonny and Cher
of the bird world,

hopping around the forest floor,
impressing each other
with their vocal gymnastics.

David is hoping
they're up for a threesome.

Unlike most birds, in this species,
the males and females sing together.

They do not use their song
primarily to defend territories
or attract mates,

but the males and females together
use song to establish

connection between each other in the
forest - to sort of collectively

define a pair bond
between the two of them.

So if a clarinet interjects into
the mix, it's not seen as a threat

or a challenge, or something
like that. It's more like,
"Oh, another sound to riff off of."

I think it's very easy to get birds
to react to human noises.

I can make woodpeckers drum
by clicking my tongue.

If you whistle at a bird
at the right frequency,

it's going to reply, because it's
a frequency its own species uses.

And I think many birds
are rhythmical
in the sounds they produce.

Many birds produce very pure tones,

which is why David would want
to call them musical.

And then he can then imitate
those sounds, to some extent,

with his musical instruments,

and the net result is you start
getting a duet between him
and the bird.

# Why do birds

# Suddenly appear

# Every time you are near...? #

So perhaps David has simply been
conducting an exercise
in call and response.

Without convincing evidence,
the scientists will never
take him seriously.

But while he's been travelling
the world,

a scientific paper
has been published

that might actually support his
belief in a pleasure principle
for birdsong.

On the 30th August 2006,

Professor Erich Jarvis of
Duke University, North Carolina,

published a paper
in the Journal of Neuroscience.

It revealed important
chemical changes taking place
in the brains of zebra finches.

Jarvis had actually found evidence

that dopamine,
the so-called pleasure molecule,

is released when they sing.

We know that in the mammalian brain,
in our own brain as well,

there's a molecule called dopamine
that is released

into certain areas of the brain
during pleasurable experiences -

during dancing, singing, even sex
and so forth, or eating good food.

And that causes addiction
to these things.

And what we discovered
is that when birds sing,

that causes dopamine release
into these similar brain areas.

There are seven brain areas
in birds

that appear to be important
for vocal learning and production.

It was in one of these, area X,

that Erich and his team recorded
a rise in the level of dopamine

when his zebra finches sang.

They seemed to be enjoying all
their singing, but particularly
when directed to females.

You've discovered a molecule
that proves this?

We've discovered... No, I'm not
going to say proves it...
Suggests, exactly.

Dopamine has been proposed to be
involved in a number of functions,

including learning, timing of
a brain system, and so forth.

One of the hypotheses out there,
and it's a strong one,

is that it's involved in reinforcing
systems and reinforcing feelings.

And particularly
pleasurable feelings.

And has this been studied
in other animals? Yeah.

It's already been found...?Yeah,
so actually the brain system in
the animal studied the most, rats,

where it's for drug
addiction, it's most known
that you give rats cocaine,

you get these
huge dopamine releases

that then makes them become addicted
to the cocaine.

That's how we've thought we become
addicted to cocaine. So you generate
more pleasure from the drug,

and so this could be just
the birds' natural way of doing it.

So you think birds
might be addicted to singing?

Yeah, that's right. That's
a possibility. Could be a more
healthy addiction! That's right.

Does that mean birds sing
for the same reasons humans sing?

Um... if you ask that question

to a bunch of different biologists,
you'll get different answers.

And so I can only give you my answer,

which is I do think that birds sing,

in part, for a similar reason
why humans sing - for pleasure.

# Ah-aa-aa-aah... #

David at last found
an acknowledgement from the
science world, that birds might,

perhaps, given the right conditions
and the presence of a female bird,

possibly sing because...
yes, they enjoy it.

# Aah-aa-aa-aah... #

In the end, this is always
going to be a standoff.

But even if David's idea will never
take wing in the lecture hall,

it has come home to roost
in the recording studio.

Now at the end of his journey, he is
to join up with Simon and Richard

at Real World Studios,

to add his contribution
to their human-bird composition.

The birds have played their part,
in the form of the rhythm track.

Now David is to provide
the first human element,
playing his bass clarinet,

along with Kate St John
on cor anglais.

MUSIC STARTS

That was cool!

And finally, Simon has recruited
the band Guillemots
to play on the track.

It's one of the most natural forms
of music you could imagine,

and I've always been... I've played
music since I can remember,

but because I've got a musical ear,

I always find it fairly easy
to identify birdsongs,

so from quite early on,
I've been listening out

to different birdsongs.

Now, at this point, we can
go off into you guys. Yeah.

At the moment,
it goes to quite a formal reel...

'Absolutely no idea
what they're gonna do.

'What you're seeing today is very
much kind of edge-of-the-seat stuff.

'We haven't had any rehearsals.
We're just seeing what happens. '

Is that the corncrake there?
Yeah, the corncrake...

I really believe

birdsong IS music, and that
conclusion has been reinforced

and pushed a little further by
meeting all these interesting
people and working with them,

and I think making music this way
hopefully makes one less selfish,

and a better listener.

I'm responding to the environment,

really interacting
with the world around.

All right, I'm ready.

OK. Here we go.

Good luck, studio.

Subtitles by Judith Russell
Red Bee Media Ltd 2007

E-mail subtitling@bbc.co.uk