Resonate Magazine | Australian Music Centre

Pied butcherbird at Wogarno Station
© Chris Tate

In 1891, gold was discovered in Mount Magnet, prompting Western Australia's first gold rush. Although this remote mining centre has slowed significantly since its heyday, I struck gold here myself in 2002. Spread out across a paddock at Wogarno Station, three pied butcherbirds delivered up antiphonal song with a precision that called to mind the dovetailing of the medieval hocket (an effect creating a single melodic line). The tonal beauty and apparent musical sophistication of the birds stunned me. I began notating their phrases and never looked back.

A bird's song can function as deed to his territory – an auditory 'keep out' sign – or as a 'come hither' to his female counterpart, a serenade, if you will. It can serve as a group password. In fact, 'Why do birds sing?' involves a complex web of many correct answers and as many unanswered questions. However, it seemed clear to me then (and has remained so in my five-year study of their songs) that pied butcherbirds' vocal complexity transcends biological requirements. Function simply does not explain all the diversity in their song, which varies geographically, seasonally, and individually.

The advent of the tape recorder, followed by further technological advances such as digital recording and computer analysis programs, has allowed biologists to leapfrog over musicians and develop the study of avian acoustics and its concomitant behaviour. A groundswell of activity followed, much of it based on sonographic analysis. But consider this – dependence on the sonogram shifts the focus of birdsong from a trained ear to a trained eye. This is echoed in Western classical music when the score is privileged above the sonic experience. The sonogram does not represent what the human ear (and likely the bird's ear) hears. In my work, I pair music notation and sonograms.

Is musicality a capacity we share with other species? Do non-human animals derive pleasure from their sound production efforts? Are they capable of behaviour that is aesthetic? An affirmative answer would point to a biological basis to aesthetics, that music is somewhere there in the biology. Intriguingly, Eastern Gondwana (Australia and Papua New Guinea) is implicated as the birthplace of songbirds in recent 'If Homo sapiens learned music from birds, this continent is the birthplace of music.' papers citing DNA sequence data. If Homo sapiens learned music from birds, this continent is the birthplace of music.

True songbirds learn their songs, and some are known to appropriate human music and other human sounds into their vocabulary. The earliest published manual for training of singing birds dates from c. 1700; one is still in print, The bird fancyer's delight, used to teach canaries, nightingales, starlings, and other birds given to the human animal's sense of musicality.

Both species of Australian lyrebirds, the superb and the Albert's, appropriate human sounds without prompting, as do pied butcherbirds, often assembling these sounds in lengthy mimicry cycles. Birds take each others' stuff, use stuff, chop stuff up, re-stuff, and re-cycle – it's a natural continuum. It's the way musicians work as well. The natural world of bird can be slotted in both an ancient tradition and a postmodern one. Birdsong is authentic, original, by and large untainted, exotic, primitivist – it is 'other'.

Galah abseiling © Jon Rose

One of my performance outcomes at the Sounds Outback Festival (3-5 October, Wogarno Station) was a bird whistle improvisation with Jon Rose. We began with Audubon birchwood and metal devices that we twisted and twirled in order to coax bird-like sounds from them, and continued with other whistles variously made out of metal, wood, clay, and plastic – they chirp, warble, squeak, croak, pipe, tweet, twitter, and, of course, whistle. We concluded with a pair of Crackle Boxes. The Kraakdoos, or Crackle Box, was designed by Michel Waisvisz at STEIM/Amsterdam in the 1970s. This touch- and pressure-sensitive device employs the human body as a part of the electronics. Finger contact makes it squeak and glitch, warble and wail, not unlike some birds.

Concert promoter Tos Mahoney asked me to play a few fiddle tunes as well, and, since Australia has never developed its own fiddle tradition (Australian fiddlers adhere to traditional tunes from the British Isles), I offered up some of my twisted arrangements of American hoedowns, rags, and bluegrass. The tunes seemed particularly appropriate in the shearers' shed.

Western Bowerbird bower, Wogarno Station
© Hollis Taylor

The next morning, I was up early to record pre-dawn pied butcherbird phrases, until interrupted by a raucous flock of galahs. 'We're pink, we're grey, we're pink,' they signaled, as they wheeled across the sky. Their shrill chri-chris accompanied wild landings on the diagonal wires supporting the television aerial. The galahs abseiled down the wires with their beaks, sometimes somersaulting as they went.

Later that day, station owner L.J. Campbell gave me a tour of several western bowerbird bowers. One mound of twigs over a metre in diameter had an avenue bower constructed atop it, its walls painted yellow. While the bowerbird painted in yellow, his decorating tastes run to things green and white (unlike my local satin bowerbird in the Blue Mountains, who has a preference for blue, with yellow a second choice). The western bowerbird had an elaborately decorated 'welcoming mat' of green or white seedpods, broken glass, shells, stones, skeletons, feathers, and other found objects. The avenue bower is not a nest – it is where he sings and dances and lures the female in, and where they would mate if successful.

Vocalists, composers, improvisers, architects, decorators, painters, dancers… it would seem anthropomorphic not to entertain the idea that aesthetics exist in species apart from the human animal.

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