Snowball, the Dancing Bird

A video of a dancing bird has become the latest YouTube sensation. Some people thought the bird's performance was faked, but for me, it is not surprising, given the sophisticated ability birds demonstrate for manipulating pitch and rhythm in their songs, that a bird shows the ability to keep time with music. Neuroscientists, including John Iversen of the Neurosciences Institute, have studied the dancing bird and confirm it is capable of extracting a beat from sound.



What impressed me most about Snowball's performance is when he lifts his leg and gives it a little shake before bringing it down. As the investigators mention, it may be prompted by the pace being too fast to put his foot all the way down in time with the faster beat, but it piques my curiosity further. It appears Snowball is dividing the beat when he waves his foot, into two or three little waves, which if I am seeing it correctly, suggests birds are capable of division of the beat and perceiving and manipulating a metrical framework. This is simply astonishing were it be to true, but perhaps not unexpected given the sophistication of bird vocalization and communication. It is one thing for a bird to keep time with a beat and an entirely different for a bird to exhibit division of the beat.

When people sing (or compose a melody to sing) the tones are not of arbitrary duration. No one could sing a song consisting of a series of tones of arbitrary duration measured to fractions of a second. Could you imagine signing a melody: A 1000ms, F 1500ms, E 500ms, D 1000ms, A 1000ms? The human mind is not well suited for measuring duration in milliseconds on an ordinary basis (we can leave out extraordinary abilities some humans may possess or develop). What if someone asked you to pick up the pace to sign faster? Each duration would have to be recalculated down to the millisecond, in your head. For this reason, music is organized by relative measures of duration.

In reality, when people sing or play music, they use simple division of the beat to measure duration. This is usually achieved through the division of a steady beat by whole fractions, usually simple divisors, like two or three. The most basic division of the beat is by two. When a tone of shorter duration than the beat is required, the melody will use a tone one half of the beat, or one quarter or one eighth and so on, down to the ability of humans to resolve divisions of time. The other main division of the beat observed in music is by three. So for every beat you have the possibility of three tones, six tones, twelve tones and so on. The human ability for perceiving and manipulation this time structure is sophisticated. Musicians can anticipate the division of future beats, playing notes that persist across multiple divisions of the beat or create "holes" or silences for certain beats, playing with the listeners expectations (this is called syncopation). I have to wonder if the small movements he makes dividing the beat follow any ornamentation of percussion or melody in the song. In the background, another bird can be seen bobbing his head to the beat, in a clear parallel to human "head banging."

Although I would have to watch a lot more video to be sure, what I have seen suggests he may be dividing the beat and deserves further investigation. I would not be surprised to find that birds do erect a sense of metrical time in sound and can mentally divide the beat and even anticipate it, perhaps even perceive syncopation. It is fascinating to watch Snowball lose and pick up the beat again.

I did watch a couple of video clips. At about 2:00 into the following video he lifts his foot and waves time to the beat, but does not divide it.
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7IZmRnAo6s)


In the following video, notice how he keeps the beat when Stevie Nicks sings "ooh, ooh" on the beat? This suggests he has an expectation of the beat even when the beat is not marked by a percussive instrument. At about 1:05 he may have divided the beat with a wave. He does lose the beat more frequently when based only on Nick's vocals or less percussive sections. At 2:31 he appears to divide the beat with a wave again. And at 2:56. I'm not sure if he's just losing the beat or dividing it...but this is a seriously important question about the intelligence of birds. At 4:43 also.
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYMBIGTteWA&feature=channel)

(Note: The time required for a complete cycle of A above middle C is 2.27 milliseconds and a sixteenth note at a metronomic pace of 60 clicks per second is 250 milliseconds, according to Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millisecond 2009)

MuseScore

I am trying out MuseScore (http://musescore.org), an open source, free software for music composition and notation printing. It is the most robust and full featured of the open source music editors. It has a few bugs and some way to go before its features threaten the commercial competition, but it looks promising.

I like the way it displays the score as a big page you can move around by dragging. I am still using an older version of Cakewalk, and it drives me crazy scrolling horizontally to read a song lyric. With MuseScore I can read music as if it were printed on a sheet of paper without scrolling. In Cakewalk, I get lost scrolling through the score, but in MuseScore I can immediately see where I am.

Using Cakewalk's linear display it is difficult to compare measure to measure in a song. If I want to compare the melody in the fourth measure of the second verse to the melody in the fourth measure of the first verse, I must furiously scroll back and forth. Or print the score out for easy comparison.

There Grew a Tree by Liberty Dawne

On March 11 2007, the audience of the AFI Silver in Silver Spring Maryland was treated to live music from a group of young musicians after the screening of the documentary film on Stephen Wade, Catching the Music. I attended as a member of the Folkstreams team (we had to sprint to the local Office Depot for a ethernet cable or the Folkstreams presentation would never have made it to the silver screen) and we enjoyed the music afterward very much, as did the audience. The musicians Stephen brought with him played wonderfully, each featured on their own and along with Stephen's magical banjo playing. My favorite was Liberty Dawne who sings and plays the fiddle. She has a CD available, which I purchased from her at the show and that you should give a listen to.

A favorite of mine is Pass that Burley Down, a standout song of the set and one of two songs written by Liberty from an experience stripping tobacco. It is reminiscent of work songs and field hollers from African American music (upon which the blues is based). It occurred to me this song draws upon a similar tradition of field work in Appalachian culture. I must be attracted to this quality it shares with the blues, since I have loved the blues since I discovered the music as a teenager in the late 1970s. My attraction is not an academic one. I don't like the song because of its associations, but on its own merits. The song is a good one. This song shows off Liberty talent's, being fast paced and sparkling.

I am attracted to albums that stand as a complete picture of the artist without being obviously autobiographical. I like the music to represent the essence of the individual not a detailed report on their life. I am not so interested in whether each song is successful in a popular sense, but that each song, and the songs as a whole, represent who the songwriter authentically is. It doesn't matter to me if a song is sentimental (which seems to be the art-crime of the last century) as long as it authentically represents the sentimentality of the artist in an artistically interesting way. That is all we can ask for from art.

As such, one of my favorite albums is Mary Chapin Carpenter's first, Hometown Girl, which I tend to identify with since I grew up in the Metro DC area and share some of the feelings expressed in the songs. I spent a good many hours of my childhood in the Air and Space Museum. I think I also share the romantic vision of a suburban kid who grew up close to the fading cultures of the Eastern Shore and the Appalachians close at hand. My family, like many others, frequently visited the Chesapeake and over to the Delmarva, or west to the Blue Ridge, passing through farm country, stopping at farmer's markets, and the like, which may explain my interest in Folkstreams and co-founding a website bringing social networking to solve the problems of sustainable farming, FarmFoody. I am drifting off topic. Although I think she would like to compare well to folk music superstar Alison Krauss, another fiddle player who sings, I think she mines a vein closer to Gillian Welch, who sets modern themes to traditional music.

Perhaps this is why I like "visionary" artists, since they are just doing their own thing, putting whatever is on their mind into their works, without worrying about the "art scene" or what some professor told them, trying to be the next Picasso (or Beatles). I think people need to stop trying to be the next anything, since we know that a general fighting the last war is a losing proposition. After all, that is what artistic expression is, putting what's on your mind or what you are feeling into an external, material form.

I don't quite feel that coherency as strongly in There Grew a Tree, perhaps because many of the songs are traditional and perhaps because of that, lacks the authority of a singer songwriter's first album, but since the album is one of traditional music, that can be expected. For her, the traditional songs are part of her identity. The songs were chosen more in connection with her family and her memory than written from those with the exception of the two songs she penned. The first albums by singer songwriters are frequently powerful since they usually represent the bottled up emotion of their first decade of song writing. Perhaps There Grew a Tree is much the same, only through the medium of a selection of traditional and popular songs important to the artist.

I must apologize if this review has drifted into myriad other directions, but it can't be helped. I'm just made that way.

Among the covers, Billy Gray is an excellent well written song, which Liberty runs through with an attractive quality to her voice. I think she struggles a bit with some of the more complicated melodies, but I'll leave that to people who judge singing contests. The instrumental playing on this album is wonderful and all who participated are excellent musicians.

Happy Farmer/Redwing is a mashup of a western swing tune and a classical piece. She pulls it off pretty good and I like the idea of combining music from different eras and styles, which I attempted couple of times in my own pathetic musical ramblings, giving the mashup some resonance with my inclinations.

She includes You are My Sunshine, Walkin' the Dog, Orange Blossom Special (very nicely done), Kentucky and Runaway Train.

She includes Amazing Grace on the album. Along with Silent Night, Amazing Grace is one of my two favorite traditional songs, which stand above nearly every song I know and inhabit some transcendent space we barely comprehend.

The second song written by Liberty, There Grew a Tree, is a wonderful metaphor for the growth of family and generations. I find the two songs Liberty wrote to be the most effective of the album and I had assumed they were traditional numbers until I read the CD notes. It may be that the songs she wrote fit her style better than the others. They are both strong songs and perhaps it was singing her own songs that gave them greater strength. I wish the songs had been all her own.

The CD was released in 2001 so I have no doubt her playing, writing and singing has improved, but There Grew a Tree can still be had from amazon I recommend you seek it out. I don't think much of music reviews, so I really don't write them. Just go out and listen.