YOU CAN'T TRUST MUSIC

Words can be looked up, sounds cannot.

Hear us, you who are no more than leaves always falling, you mortals benighted by nature,
You enfeebled and powerless creatures of earth always haunting a world of mere shadows,
Entities without wings, insubstantial as dreams, you ephemeral things, you human beings:
Turn your minds to our words, our ethereal words, for the words of the birds last forever!
—Aristophanes, The Birds
(*aristophanes komt ook voor in de tekst over the voice! hiccup)

Music reflects changes in the world: its mechanism relies on making noise palatable by means of subjectively defined order.

Reports from Australia’s Great Dividing Range in southern Queensland describe how the recent bushfires of 2019 potentially wiped out entire species of birds: birds that have been singing the same songs for millions of years. According to one news report, “It is said that all the birdsongs in the world go back to these birds.”13 If birdsong describes a territory, then these songs are the only living record of landscapes that no longer exist. This constitutes a major loss not just for biodiversity but for the potential in accessing these sonic records. The complexity of belonging to a geographical area feeds and inspires ways of remembering, for humans as well as birds. As Deleuze writes: “As birds sing their territory, so do humans speak or sing theirs.”

the Kaluli people, 
..a set of beliefs that organizes the interpretation of everyday living in a world that is full of birds and alive with their sounds. Myths, seasons, colors, gender, taboos, curses, spells, time, space, and naming are systematically patterned; all of these are grounded in the perception of birds, as indicated foremost by the presence of sound…
Feld claims that the Kaluli people try to imitate the sounds of birds when they want to evoke a sense of reminiscence and nostalgia: the tones prepares an audience for a certain kind of remembering.21 And so when composing these songs, the Kaluli try to vocalize in a “bird language” which, unlike practical everyday language, evokes memories, events, and most of all, places. “Re-membering is a bodily activity of re-turning.”

While working in his lab, he ponders the possible loss of classical European music should the apocalypse occur. Inspired by a vision of a resilient beetle crawling out of the rubble, he decides to create a “preserving machine” that could encapsulate classical compositions in the bodies of animals. If the beetle is the only thing to rise from the ashes, he thinks, let it carry the world’s greatest symphonies. (Philip K. Dick's fable "the preserving machine" describes the pursuits of a scientist named Doc Labyrinth).

Labyrinth successfully creates the preserving machine. He feeds musical score sheets into the machine, and each produces a different animal: “Mozart emerges in the body of a small bird, Beethoven comes out as a beetle, Schubert is a sheep and so on.” The doctor creates several animals, each one unique, each embodying a composer’s work, and releases them into a forested grove behind his lab. The hope is that when the animals are someday fed back into the machine they will release the music they have preserved in their bodies. However, sometime later, he finds that the animals in the forest have died, mutated, or become feral. “He had forgotten the lesson of the Garden of Eden: that once a thing has been fashioned it begins to exist on its own, and thus ceases to be the property of its creator to mold and direct as he wishes … he had ensured their survival, but erased their meaning.” Finally, he captures a beetle and feeds it back into the preserving machine, expecting to hear Bach. Instead, the sound that emerges is wild and hideous.

Human and animal utterances articulate distance, texture, and intent. They respond to the acoustics of landscapes; they are amplified in some spaces and dampened in others. The quality, cadence, and rhythm of uttered sounds serve different purposes of survival and movement. They can document changes in landscape through their evolution. Through instances of human relation to birdsong and other natural sounds, and the way they have been transcribed, adapted, and memorialized by humans throughout millennia, we can trace otherwise invisible political interventions into landscapes and soundscapes.

• Guided by voice The term “birdsong” is contested by musicologists. There is much potential slippage between the melodic sounds produced by a bird and songs composed by humans, but song has long been thought to be the purview of the human creator: “That which makes music an art is that which separates it from nature and the natural voices of birds,” writes Elizabeth Leach.

…If both human music and birdsong respond to space—by articulating a relation between memories, sound, and place—then by altering, imitating, and reproducing melodies, humans alter landscapes too. Song is a species-specific document of and a map to a history of geological, political, biological, and industrial change.

As musicologist Susan McClary has written, “Music enters through the ear, that most vulnerable organ of perception that cannot be opened or closed selectively. And especially in Western culture, where the visual is a privileged source of knowledge, it tends to slip around and surprise us.”

-Signal
…Animal music, and music created in collaboration with animals, offers a glimpse into alternative histories that prioritize other perspectives. Could the space of projection that opens when humans assign meaning to birdsong offer a mixed perspective, a shared opportunity to navigate the future? From Noah’s dove to canaries in the coalmine, birds are sentinel species. Their songs preserve a history of geopolitics, and simultaneously, a warning about a future history of human intervention.