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+ - Birdsong Isn't Music After All-> 2

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes "Although humans have long attributed musical qualities to birdsong, cold, hard statistics show that's all an illusion. Out of the 243 comparisons researchers made between nightingale wrens' songs and musical scales, only six matched harmonic intervals. Despite the beauty of birdsong, when we call it music we’re projecting our own biases."
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Birdsong Isn't Music After All More

Birdsong Isn't Music After All

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  • Dead wrong. Because we perceive it as music, it is music. It may be different music that is not properly accounted for in the current mathematical models, but that is a shortcoming of the model. Perhaps if we expand the model so that it can account for everything that humans have called music or musical, we will learn something.

    • That was my very first thought too. It's an interesting argument, but not one I'd be likely to confront. I have been far more pleased by the sound (or songs) of birds than with 90% of radio "music". I also wouldn't doubt that in the earlier years of jazz, some argued that it wasn't music, and probably the same for other genres.

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