Many people harbor the more or less well-thought-out conviction that the ability to understand and produce music as such is something that distinguishes humans from animals. According to Hoerner’s arguments on the fundamental physical ways in which acoustic phenomena can be organized, this shifts the focus to the nature of the specific organs of perception and processing in living beings.
This is a twofold step, because it is not only necessary to consider how and whether music can be produced as an acoustic phenomenon, but also whether it is understood as such. A bird, for example, is capable of producing elaborate melodies. But does it also experience them as “music”? Whales modify their songs over long periods of time. But are they really “songs” for the sea creatures? If one wants to deny animals the ability to experience their own acoustic art forms as music (which intuition actually suggests), one must also explicitly state the necessary conditions for something to be music, and so we are back to square one on our imaginary game board.
Theoretical considerations of the biological framework have been remarkably few in the history of music aesthetics. Biologists, anthropologists, ethnomusicologists, and others discussed the topic extensively in May 1997 at a meeting at the Institute of Biomusicology in Fiesole, near Florence. One of the results is the article “The Necessity of and Problems with a Universal Musicology” by French composer François-Bernard Mâche. He offers some remarkable reflections on possible criteria that could help distinguish between acoustic expressions of animals and human music.
Rhythmic organization, for example, is not a specifically human phenomenon. According to Mâche, some birds are quite capable of organizing rhythmic functions over long periods of time. There is, for example, Turtur brehmeri, an African pigeon species that produces long accelerandi—the series begins with intervals of 2.2 seconds. Mâche also mentions Sarothura lugens, a species of dwarf finch that artfully combines accelerando, crescendo, and increasingly higher pitches. Some bird species therefore appear to be capable of producing regular time intervals with precision. It seems less likely that they (or any other animal species) would also be capable of organizing a time grid hierarchically, i.e., of distinguishing between heavy and light times.
Another frequently cited universal characteristic of music is the use of scales, i.e., of clearly defined, distinct pitch classes. These also occur in the animal world, as Mâche’s examples show. For example, Hacyon badus, a species of kingfisher, has its own system of very small intervals, and Cossypha cyanocampter, a species of thrush, constructs such sophisticated melodies within its scale system that they could be confused with human creations. Erythropygia leucosticta uses a chromatic scale within which even articulatory variations are introduced. Some bird species, especially robins, even have excellent tone steps comparable to our fundamental tones.
If music is sufficiently defined as something that has rhythm or scale-based melody, then one must conclude that music—at least in rudimentary form—also exists in the animal kingdom. Mâche suggests this conclusion:
In many cases, the syntax of animal signals clearly shares characteristics with music. I believe that all processes that use repetition—an obvious musical universal—can be found in the animal world: refrain, rhyme, symmetry, reprise, song form, bar form, and so on.
Furthermore, according to Mâche, it is obvious that some bird species sing for pure pleasure. He goes on to speculate about how a skill that was originally associated with an evolutionary advantage can, so to speak, fluidly transform into an end in itself.
Seeing culture as something rooted in a natural function and imagining that it grew beyond the pure purpose of survival is, of course, somewhat heretical for a large number of biologists and musicians. I leave the decision to the recording device and can only say that, as a composer, I regard Craticus nigrogularis as a kind of colleague.
What is interesting is the implicit shift in criteria for what is and is not music that takes place in the article. It moves from external characteristics to a necessary functional one: music is something that—to use Kant’s words—arouses disinterested pleasure. Whether or not one agrees with Mâche’s examples in detail, his argument shows that formal, external characteristics of music can never reliably serve to define music in such a way that it can be used as a criterion for distinguishing between the animal and human realms.
The question is whether one wants to do that at all. It is compelling insofar as our intuition tells us that music has something to do with a highly cognitive and intellectual form of experience and reflection, and we do not want to attribute this kind of reflection to animals. However, this does not bring us any closer to a definition of “music”: it cannot be based on the external characteristics of musical works of art. Just as Hoerner’s characterization based on structural features was too narrow, the criteria mentioned by Mâche regarding the organization of meter and pitch classes are too broad, reinforcing the impression that drawing boundaries with these instruments is increasingly futile and ad hoc, without getting to the heart of the matter. It seems that a useful definition of “music” must in some way be motivated by the function that music has.