KVR Audio

hibidy · Post by **hibidy** » Wed Sep 24, 2014 11:31 pm

I hope that robin wasn't harmed in the making of that.

ZenPunkHippy · Post by **ZenPunkHippy** » Wed Sep 24, 2014 11:36 pm

Dunno about the robin, but some serious synth abuse took place

ghettosynth · Post by **ghettosynth** » Thu Sep 25, 2014 12:13 am

Oh, and by the way, I have the definitive answer to the question, if I may paraphrase Quincy Jones?

What is a noise record? Any record that sells under 20 copies is a noise record, once it sells over that, it is no longer a noise record.

hibidy · Post by **hibidy** » Thu Sep 25, 2014 12:15 am

Yeah, but that doesn't explain "thriller"

Musicologo · Post by **Musicologo** » Thu Sep 25, 2014 5:01 am

Oh, the old animal discussion...
Recent finding by Patel seem to point that only animals that "speak" can coordinate to a beat.
http://emusicology.org/article/view/3745/3305

Therefore a dog cannot coordinate to a beat, a cat can't either, however some birds like parrots and araras can!
Also, sea lions coordinate to a beat...

So it seems that the coordination to a beat is a spandrel from the ability of "speaking"...

What birds do is to produce sounds, but are they making music? In the same sense as we do, having the same *social and biological* function it seems to not be the case. So perhaps they are just doing sounds with a different purpose. Humans also make lots of sounds with different purposes (like talking or moaning or shouting....) that mainly are not music. Those same sounds can be included in music or performance but in isolation they are not used with that purpose and generally have other labels like "speaking", "communicating", "flashing", "warning", "drawing attention", etc.

In the end, I am inclined to think that music as a functional concept is mostly human because humans do it with a certain purpose and function.

hibidy · Post by **hibidy** » Thu Sep 25, 2014 5:24 am

Too technical........bring on the songbirds!!!!!!!!

trimph1 · Post by **trimph1** » Thu Sep 25, 2014 8:14 pm

We seem to be getting mockingbird singing here as well. At one time, running an old 18hp hit&miss engine I caught the bird singing exactly the same thing as the hit & miss engine.

They really can do that

jancivil · Post by **jancivil** » Sun Sep 28, 2014 7:41 am

That brings up bird abilities as though to bring 'talent' into the equation. I don't know what the point is to a bird having advanced ability, it gets into the teleological argument which I don't want to get into as an HPC kind of thing. I used to be more of a philosophical bent but it isn't that important, I'm happy to have birds making noise, even this one kind of CAWing bird here which does not IME make a really nice sound and used to wake me up at five in the morning. Now it's a bit Heckle and Jeckle...

I am interested in music enough to note 'birds that can talk can dance to a beat', which I'm skeptical of for more than one reason.
1) they aren't talking, they are mimic'ing, I think. Now, they are mimic'ing according to periodicity, 'speech' is definitely 'rhythm', here.

2) I don't extrapolate from that any leaning towards a metronomic pulse. I have watched some videos of parrot-type birds moving to disco and what-not, and in fact they lose the beat fairly frequently. But seem to locate it again. I think bird brains are not our brains. I don't know what goes on.

3) I think the rhythm of speech is not congruent with 'beat' type of thinking, really. I think it's compelling to make rhythmic speech scan against a steady pulse, but I do not think the former is a function of the latter. If you go to transcribe speech, of course you have to begin with a pulse to describe it. But you find you have to make ratios of 'in the time of', and syncopate from that, and perhaps nest another 'in the time of' the thing 'in the time of' the duple or triple thing you set as the basis
(EG: 7:4 while the 4 is 4:3).
It's tempting and I think of utility to use this dealing with birdsong.
OTOH: Messiaen liked his idea of isorhythm, which comports somewhat with medieval isorhythm but he is said to have been more or less ignorant of that when he started. I don't recall accurately what the fact is there.
But in any case you get into quite complex notions of the time, dealing in speech purely and in birdsong; which in itself neither really fit the artifices of music we typically deal in.

4) So a bird dancing to Michael Jackson or something. I guess that is to some extent a product of domestication and conditioning. The bird cops the chainsaw noises, this is in the day-to-day; the bird gets to like that rock-steady or something... Birds dealing with human society in some weird bird way we aren't really about to understand exactly. But for me abstracting what a bird does "musically" means learning from birds, not shoehorning birds into our paradigm.

aciddose · Post by **aciddose** » Sun Sep 28, 2014 8:11 am

Birds are definitely communicating. They use distinct signals to transmit different information. They are capable of learning new signals from other birds, adapting and mimicking those signals.

How is this any different from how we communicate? The only distinction you might draw is with regard to the scope of communication or in other words the amount of data transmitted.

We can't get into whether birds are using abstraction or that their communication is at the level of complexity where it might benefit from such an ability, as we don't speak bird.

Most of the bird "song" you are likely to have been exposed to will be made up of sentences formed from calls like "threat. threat. threat. threat. here i am. where are you? here i am. here i am. here i am. threat. threat."

In various species of bird these tweets are not easy to distinguish. There will be minor timbre or pitch contour variations, much like in Chinese.

Song however is something else.

Actually, reading this article after having written the above content (based wholly upon my own personal experience listening to birds when they're around) I was quite happy to see this has all been very well known for hundreds of years.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird_vocalization

In fact there is a short bit about "bird language", or in other words the theorized potential for birds to communicate via abstraction. This is quite exciting and it is unfortunate people remain so ignorant of these sorts of facts all around us.

We're really not quite so special as people seem to believe.

Musicologo · Post by **Musicologo** » Sun Sep 28, 2014 5:36 pm

Exactly.
Given the information I have available at this day and age, I am inclined to believe birds make these sounds to communicate, warn, or even to learn with each other, and mainly by mimicking.

I do not believe they are consciously manipulating sounds for entertainment, recreation or to extract pleasure from them.

IF, we end up getting information in this later sense, then I might revise my beliefs (anyone wants to start EEGing bird brains and conduct scientific study?).

But, again, this is a bit "shoehorning" paradigms. The distiction between "producing sounds with the function to communitate versus manipulating creatively sounds" perhaps only makes sense for a human brain and it is not relevant at all for a bird brain...

And it is exactly because of those things I believe right now that music is a human thing. Not only because of the thing itself but because of the assumptions we've made when we created the concept!...

aciddose · Post by **aciddose** » Mon Sep 29, 2014 1:26 am

You need to factor into this what constitutes bird song vs. calls, though.

Bird song usually is made up of a melody and rhythm. It really is music and not just a series of calls as you might usually be hearing while listening to birds.

It is used to attract mates. The ability to compose attractive songs is sexually selected.

The fact the song is specifically selected for aesthetic tells us it is exactly like music.

(anyone wants to start EEGing bird brains and conduct scientific study?).

Read the Wikipedia article. It covers this and links to several studies. You can read those papers if you are further interested in this topic.

jancivil · Post by **jancivil** » Mon Sep 29, 2014 1:45 am

Another thing you find - I have seen that article and followed up, I've looked into it a bit - is 'the bird's tutor' as it puts it there.
The capacity of it is hard-wired but there are birds that are thwarted by not having sufficient training.

And they do select 'licks' and combine them variously so it does look like 'composing', doesn't it. I think

"The ability to compose attractive songs is sexually selected.

The fact the song is specifically selected for aesthetic tells us it is exactly like music."

looks practically bulletproof.

trimph1 · Post by **trimph1** » Mon Sep 29, 2014 5:15 pm

It does doesn't it. After watching 3 mockingbirds singing at each other I almost got the feeling that something like 'trading licks' was occurring.

I am going to have to get some field recording done by the sounds of them.

aciddose · Post by **aciddose** » Mon Sep 29, 2014 9:25 pm

The thing that really convinced me was the situation I mentioned, which has occurred several times over the years.

I'm playing some monophonic improvisation on a subtractive... I start to hear this "echo" effect which confuses the **** out of me, I'm not kidding.

I stop playing and I hear a slightly modified playback of the same thing I was just playing, plus some mixing with additional melody.

Is somebody across the street playing another synthesizer and duplicating what I've played? How is this possible?

I realize it was a bird! It sounds a few more typical flavors of its own song...

The only thing I can rationalize here besides that the bird was mimicking my "licks" was that perhaps I had played something that was very similar to some existing birdsong... The probability of this however seems low as I was playing in 12TET, while the natural birdsong is most often not even close.

vurt · Post by **vurt** » Sat Oct 04, 2014 2:55 pm

Birds make noise for the same reasons fish do.

What is the difference between music and noise? [years-dead slappyfight revived]