FEATURE ARTICLE
Relative Pitch and the Song of Black-Capped Chickadees
Chickadees, like people, have a strong sense of relative pitch. These birds use skillful, precise pitch changes to advertise their quality and attract mates
Ron Weisman, Laurene Ratcliffe
More than 2,000 years ago, the acerbic philosopher Marcus Tullius
Cicero observed that Roman songbirds compose more excellent melodies
than any musician. He certainly doesn't stand alone in history on
that count; it is a nearly universal human experience to find joy
and wonder in birdsong—and to compare the songs to human
music. People have been transcribing melodies of birds into the
notation of music since at least the 18th century; Vivaldi's
Goldfinch concerto and Handel's Cuckoo and the
Nightingale organ concerto include musical notation for
birdsongs. In the early 1900s, the New England naturalist and
composer F. Schuyler Mathews presented the songs of many North
American birds in musical notation in his Field Book of Wild
Birds and Their Music in order to help readers identify
species common in the eastern United States.
Later biologists did not share Mathews's enthusiasm for musical
descriptions of birdsongs. Donald Borror, a master bioacoustician
and field biologist, found many of the song descriptions inadequate
by modern standards, as he wrote in his foreword to the 1967
reprinting of Mathews's book. Borror acknowledged that Mathews
lacked modern electronic equipment and that his primary interest was
in the musical content of birdsongs. Today, however, Mathews's
approach seems dated and quaint. Musical notation is simply unable
to provide the detailed, accurate and reproducible descriptions
required in modern bioacoustical analyses of vocal communication
among songbirds. Mathews's approach helps musically trained people
recognize birdsongs, but it fails to objectively describe birdsongs
and calls. For bioacousticians, accurate observations are a crucial
first step in analyzing the role of songs in the life of a species.
Modern ornithologists believe that songbirds first appeared some 40
million to 50 million years before human beings. That people derive
pleasure from birdsongs and recognize their musical features
suggests that despite the vast evolutionary gulf between birds and
mammals, songbirds and humans share some common auditory perceptual
abilities. In this article, we focus on relative pitch, the
ability to recognize relationships between acoustic frequencies. We
review studies suggesting that humans and songbirds share the
ability to perceive relative pitch changes and exploring the
evolutionary functions of birds' perception and use of relative pitch.
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