BIRDSONG AND THE TRANSPECIES AESTHETIC

Music has been defined as organized sound, but anyone who plays or listens to it knows that is a lame definition. It has also been defined as structured sound meant to be appreciated and apprehended for an aesthetic sake alone, something assumed that only humans can do. Neither definition is especially useful in making sense of music in a transpecies world. In my contribution I will argue that transpecies music is most clearly a music that no one species could make alone. Its value is that it transcends the aesthetics of any one species as it dares to learn the aesthetics of other species. It was Charles Darwin who first specifically posited that many animals have evolved an aesthetic sense—that is why birds, for example, have beautiful feathers, and beautiful songs. But why do we humans find such things beautiful if they were not evolved for us? We may have our own species-specific aesthetic sense, but if we open this sense up to include the values of other species, we expand the role music can serve in situating our species in a wider natural world. Not all sounds made by animals should be considered music. I focus on those sounds whose meaning is grasped in performance, often involving repetition, where emotional content and overall shape and form matter more than any message or function in the song. Thus saying that animals sing to attract mates and defend territories deflects attention on their music from the song itself to the reason for the song, pushing our attention away from what matters most in the use of music to design a more integrated, beautiful, and melodious sense of a human place in a vast world of musical beings: from crickets to catbirds to orcas to wolves.