This season of So Curious, we've talked plenty about the music humans make. But what about the music made by other animals?

First, Bey and Kirsten sit down with birdsong researcher Dr. Stephen Nowicki to learn the surprising science behind how and why birds sing. Then, the two are joined by Dr. Lori Marino to explore the songs and sounds of dolphins and whales. And to close the episode, inter-species musician David Rothenberg joins to speak about the music he makes in collaboration with animals, from his philosophy behind doing so to the logistics of playing music deep in the wilderness.

Links for Today's Episode:

• Learn more about Dr. Stephen Nowicki and the work of his bird communication research lab
• Learn more about Dr. Lori Marino and her work with The Whale Sanctuary Project
• Learn more about David Rothenberg and listen to more of his music
• To delve deeper into the world of inter-species musicians, check out the work of Paul Winter and R. Murray Schafer

Hello,

and welcome to the So Curious podcast presented by the Franklin Institute.

I'm The Bul Bey.

And I'm Kirsten Michelle Cills, and we are your hosts.

This whole season is all about the science of music, and we hope you're feeling wild

because today we're exploring the wonderful world of animals.

First, we're going to learn the hows and

whys behind the music that we hear out in nature.

We're going to be joined by researcher Dr.

Stephen Nowicki to learn about song birds.

And then, we're going to have an interview with Dr.

Lori Marino, who is going to tell us all about whales and dolphin calls.

And then we'll be chatting with David Rothenberg, an artist who's been described

as an inter-species musician, about his work collaborating on music with wildlife.

All right, so, Bey, what's your favorite animal sound?

Birds is an kind of like an easy answer,

but I want to give something a little bit more thoughtful.

Elephants is cool.

Elephants is so cool!

Elephant is very very cool.

What about you? That's a great one.

I was just at the zoo and I did get to hear penguin noises and they are jarring.

They sound like a horn, like one of those clown horns.

They sound like that.

They just open their neck and they're like, Oh.

They're like, What's that sound?

Where did that come from? You are a foot long.

How did you do that?

Well, okay, so at least in terms of the birds, we have someone who can help us on

the bird front because we are now joined by Dr.

Stephen Nowicki.

Steve, thanks so much for being here. My pleasure.

And can you do us a favor and just tell us about yourself?

What do you do? Feel free to brag for a few minutes.

Well, I'm a professor at Duke University.

I study animal communication, animal

signaling, behavior, and I've been doing it for a long time.

Actually, I'm a failed musician, to tell you the truth, because I went to college

to study classical music and realized that that was pretty competitive.

And I found biology along the way and fell in love with that instead.

No such thing as failure! Yes.

Because it brought you here!

Let's get right into it.

Why do song birds sing?

Well, to tell you the truth, it's mostly about fighting and flirting.

If it's a male, which is most of the birds in the north temperate zone that sing are

the males, he's basically saying, "I own this place, keep out" to other males.

But he's also, with that same song, saying

to females who hear him, "Hey, I'm an available male.

Why don't you come over and mate with me?" So those are the two main things.

It's not much to say, but it really both

have very important things in the life of an animal.

And so what bird species, specifically, does your research focus on?

I work with song sparrows and swamp sparrows.

They're beautiful songsters, the song sparrow, especially, as its name implies.

But there's these birds that everybody

who's learning birding calls LBBs - little brown birds.

They're hard to distinguish.

They're not very colorful.

They're somewhat secretive.

Although song sparrows, you'll hear a lot.

Song sparrows actually have increasingly become a suburban and even an urban bird.

You can hear song sparrows pretty much anywhere through the East Coast, up

through Canada, down through the West Coast.

Do they understand their songs as music, or is it just communication for them?

It's hard to know how to answer that question.

When we listen to music, is it just music or is it speaking to us?

I'd like to think that when we listen to music, there's communication going there,

and we're just experiencing it in an aesthetic way.

People have argued that bird songs are

a kind of bird aesthetic, and in that case, you might say it's music.

But the interesting thing is that some birds, like a song sparrow or even a swamp

sparrow, when we hear them, they sound really beautiful to our ears.

And we're tempted to say, Oh, that's beautiful music.

But there are other birds.

The yellow headed black bird comes to

mind, out west that when you hear them sing, it's really awful.

In fact, the yellow headed blackbird

song has been described as a rusty gate opening, really screechy, miserable stuff.

But hey, to the female yellow headed blackbird, it's beautiful!

It's yes - was going to say it's beautiful flirting, right!

It's Marvin Gaye, I guess!

Bey and I love to grill our guests on things.

And if they are nature or nurture, because

we're trying to get to the bottom of that in all walks of life.

When it comes to baby song birds,

are they born knowing the songs that they sing, or do they have to learn them?

Oh, most definitely they have to learn them.

But it's an interesting nature/nurture thing.

So a young bird, if that young bird

doesn't hear adults singing when it's young, and in a pretty

narrow window, the first couple of months of life, it never will make a normal song.

It'll sing something when it grows up, and it'll be just weird.

So they have to hear adults.

But what is kind of the nature part of it,

is that they have to hear adults, for many species, of the correct species.

In other words, if a song sparrow hears

nothing but swamp sparrow, it might as well hear nothing, and vice versa.

Somehow they've got genetically encoded what the possible songs that they should

learn are, but they still have to hear adults.

And then actually, just like the way young humans learn, they go through this gradual

period of development, like babbling and young humans learning speech.

And it goes much faster, but they'll start making twittery little sounds.

And eventually, over the course of a month

or so, they'll get closer and closer until they finally nail it

and start reproducing the songs that they heard when they were young.

Oh, wow. And can you tell when it's, like, a baby

singing singing and it's not quite what it should be?

Yeah, absolutely. As it turns out, my wife's also a

scientist, and she studied song development for many years.

And she'll tell you how old the bird is. Wow.

That's impressive!

But out in the field, you'll hear this in

the early spring, the young birds were born last year, say in February or March,

when they just start singing, it's soft, it's not very structured.

And a bird watcher, somebody who's

experienced, will hear it and say, "That's not quite right." And it's because they're

listening to a bird that's still practicing, still getting it right.

Do bird songs change over time?

Or do they stay the same in terms of patterns or tones?

Well, let's look at two timescales.

They used to be thought to not change over the life of the bird.

In other words, when the young bird

learned its song, the thought was, that's it.

It's not going to change for the rest of its life.

Now, more recently, people have understood

that actually songs do change over life in an interesting way.

Thinking of some work by a former

person who worked with me now at Cornell named Matt Zippel, who has shown that as

song birds age, their voice gets older, just like in humans.

We're pretty good at listening to somebody and being able to say, "Well, that's a

young person, but that's an old person." Well, it turns out same thing with birds.

So over the life of a bird, literally its voice can senesce.

And the other birds, and we've done tests showing, the other birds respond to that.

Now, interestingly, like speech,

over a long period of time, songs will change culturally. So,

Liz Derryberry has done this work out in the western mountains with these white

crown sparrows, where she's had historical recordings from 30 years ago

and asked the modern birds, "Hey, what do you think of these?"

And it turns out when you ask experimentally the current birds

to discriminate between songs recorded 30 years ago and songs recorded this week,

they respond more to the songs recorded this week, as if they don't quite

understand that those older songs are the same.

It'd be like a human going back to, say,

Old England and listening to Shakespearean language.

I mean, you could kind of understand it, but it would sound pretty weird to us.

Wow.

Is there the same sense geographically like we have?

How we can all speak English, but

different forms, depending on if you live in the south or the north, east, west?

Exactly the same thing.

It's because of culture differences, what

the evolutionary biologists would call cultural drift.

So if you record, say, song sparrows in Northwestern Pennsylvania, which is a

place we've done a lot of work, and sparrow songs from the Hudson Valley

of New York, about 500 or so kilometers distant, the birds in Northwestern

Pennsylvania barely recognize the Hudson Valley birds.

That's so interesting.

Because it's geographically different.

So they have bird accents, basically.

They have bird accents, yeah! Wow.

Oh, my gosh. Processing that.

I'm picturing the New York birds with New York accents...

Yeah, exactly.

Well, let's talk about mocking birds.

How do mocking birds mimic?

How does that function work?

That's such a great question!

Because it is a question that people have

wondered about for decades, because most birds just learn their own species song.

But some birds, and mocking birds would be

the one that most people recognize, they can learn all sorts of stuff.

Starlings do that, too.

Indian Hill minas are pets that people can train to speak like humans.

Interestingly, as far as is known,

the vocal tracks of these birds are anatomically the same.

It's not like they're built differently.

Their brains, at least anatomically, are the same.

But for some reason, the brains of those mocking birds are more open.

They can learn a bunch of stuff.

And so where people are working on that

right now is they're trying to literally ask, can we find genomic differences?

Something about the way that those brains

work that's different, that makes mocking birds more open to what

they can learn or how long they can learn it.

This is actually quite interesting, not only if you're interested in birds and

birdsong, but actually it's an interesting problem in neurobiology because imagine if

we could figure out why a mocking bird can be so plastic in its learning, and got

that down to some level of mechanism and say, hey, maybe we've learned something

that could help people, say, recover from a stroke or a head injury?

That's a great segue.

What have we been able to learn about

human brains and behaviors by studying bird communication?

There has been a long interest and funding

from places like the National Institute of Health to work on bird song learning

because it does have such parallels to human learning, and that's pretty unique.

There are other animals that learn, like whales and dolphins.

There's some good work out of Germany

showing bats learn their sounds, but it's pretty rare.

And birds are something that's tractable,

so you can work with it in the field in the lab.

People have been studying bird brains for

a while, precisely because they're interested in what the underlying neural

mechanisms are that might be associated with how humans speak.

It's a little bit of a stretch in some dimensions, but when you get down to how

the neural circuitry develops, the role of hormones in that development,

down to the level of how even neurotransmitters work.

And now, genomic differences, that's a

grail out there that people are looking for, to see what we can learn more about

our own language, and how we learn it, and how we maintain it.

From looking at song birds.

Who knew when you look at that song sparrow, it might be contributing

something to the future of biomedical medicine?

Wow. Oh, my gosh.

Yeah.

So I am curious because I am famously a

night person, not a morning person, and I hate waking up early.

But I will say, one thing that is nice

about waking up in the morning is the birds that are singing and chirping.

So why do they sing in the morning?

Yeah, that's another question that still has a number of possible answers.

I'll give you some hypotheses, I'll give you some reasons people have suggested.

One long standing hypothesis is that in general, that's when the air is still,

there's little wind, and that just helps the songs transmit better.

So the idea is sing in the morning because that's when you're going to be heard best.

That's when your song is going to go the

farthest without getting blown away by the wind or distorted by noise.

Another possibility is that for most song

birds, that's when the females are most fertile.

So hey, if you're out there trying to attract a female, if you're trying to get

her interested in mating with you, go for it in the morning because that's

when, frankly, it matters ! Because she'll lay an egg every day, and

you want to get in there when she's most fertile.

Now, there's mixed evidence for these sorts of things.

I'll tell you another recent idea that a

former student I work with has gotten some data on.

This is a guy named Jason Dinh.

He tested the idea that what the birds are doing in the morning is warming up.

So imagine you're a singer or a performer

or a gymnist or whatever, and before you go on and do your performance, you do your

warm up exercises, whether it's scales or your dance routine or whatever,

because then you're going to be doing your best performance when it really matters.

And so Jason actually has found, and other people are now finding this as well, that

when birds start singing in the morning, their performance, if you will, how well

they sing the song they're trying to sing, gets better over the first little while.

So that when the sun is up and everybody's into it, they're all at the top...

They're performance ready!

When I wake up in the morning, you just get the raspiness!

Do you have a favorite bird song?

You know, I usually don't have favorites,

but I have to say that if I had to choose a song, it would be the song of the Veery.

So the Veery is a thrush, and there's wood thrushes and gray cheek thrushes and

hermit thrushes, and the Veery is in that group of thrushes.

And they all have these beautiful, metallically, flute like, lilting songs.

And they're kind of special because these birds, unlike the ones that wake you up in

the morning, they tend to sing in the evening.

And so it's like if you're going for a walk and the sun is starting to set,

you'll just hear these flute like sounds coming out of the woods.

And it's really magical.

It's really a special sound.

It's like the George Michael of birds.

Yeah, the night time birds, the sultry birds!

Those are my birds. I like that.

This was awesome. Thank you so much for taking the time to

talk to Bay and I on the So Curious podcast.

Yeah, a lot of fun. We really appreciate it.

Thank you for sharing all the insights and thank you for coming on So Curious.

All right. Thank you very much!

Thanks again to Dr.

Nowicki for taking the time to speak with us.

Love me some bird calls!

And now we are going to go from up in the air to under the sea.

We are speaking with Dr.

Lori Marino about whales and dolphins, oh, yeah!

All right. So, Dr.

Marino, thank you so much for being here on the So Curious podcast.

How's it going? Hey!

It's going very well. Thanks for having me!

Yeah, thanks for being here.

Can you introduce yourself?

Tell us a little bit about what it is you do.

Sure.

So again, my name is Lori Marino, and I'm a neuroscientist by training.

I'm currently the President of the Whale

Sanctuary Project, and we are creating a sanctuary for cap

tive beluga whales and orcas in a beautiful cove in Nova Scotia.

That'll be so beautiful. Oh, my gosh!

Can we come? Yeah, right.

That's amazing. And so you've done a lot of work

investigating the whale and dolphin intelligence, right?

So we want to hear all about your findings and how you define intelligence.

Well, intelligence is one of these words

that if you ask a 1,000 people, you will get a 1,000 different answers.

Yeah!

There's no consensus, but I think there is some general

agreement that it has something to do with how you process information,

how quickly you can, or how much information you can at a given time, or

the depth of that processing, and so on and so forth.

So, that's a general definition that holds for all animals, including humans.

We have a lot of information on Dolphin and whale and porpoise behavior

and observation, and how dolphins and whales act under various circumstances.

Intelligence is not just, oh, well, they

can do arithmetic, but their intelligence is really bound up with their sociality.

They're cultural.

What I mean by that is that many dolphins and whales have learned behavioral

traditions that are passed on from one generation to the next.

That's the definition of culture.

And that culture can be a way of obtaining food.

It could be a way of socializing.

Just like with humans, going to different

communities of dolphins and whales, you will find different cultural practices.

And that means that they're very good at

long term memory and learning from each other and observation.

Yeah. Wow.

I mean, I've always known about myself

that I've never been very book smart, school smart, like math.

But I've always said I'm street smart, and

I'm glad to hear that whales and dolphins are also street smart.

I love that, and socially smart!

And so we want to talk about humpback whale songs.

Are they as beautiful as everyone says

that they are, hearing those songs in life?

Oh, my gosh. It's just so - It's eerie.

It's moving.

And does it have rhythm?

Whatever we're going to use to quantify

something as a song - like a rhythm, timbre.

Like a pattern or something?

They have a lot of the same characteristics as what we call music.

Rhythm changes in inflection.

Beat drops.

Yeah!

So there's a lot of different ways that dolphins and whales make sound.

One way is through whistles.

One way is through clicks.

Another way is through percussive sounds.

And the neat thing about them is that they can make all these different kinds of

sounds at the same time, so they can combine them.

Different modalities, in a sense.

Like an orchestration, basically.

Yeah, exactly.

My knowledge goes as far as Finding Nimo

and Finding Dory, with Dory doing the whale songs and noises.

But I got to know, do they change over time like language does with us?

Humpback whale songs do change over time, but they change in a systematic way.

So a whale song song one year, and then

maybe the next year it'll be pretty much the same.

But, like, one part that's a change.

Could be at the end or in the middle.

When over time, like a game of telephone, that whole song is replenished or changed.

Now, do either dolphins or whales respond to human music?

Could I play one of my songs for a dolphin?

You know, that's so interesting.

I don't know the answer to that because I

don't know if really good studies have been done like that.

I can tell you this much.

They understand something about rhythm,

because there have been some studies where they've been asked to mimic human speech.

And even though they're not very good

at making the sounds of human speech because they have a different vocal

system, they're really good at mimicking the rhythm of it.

So if I said, "Hey, one, two, three,

and four", they might say, "eh, eh, eh, eh, eh."

Wow. They get that!

Or I've interacted with them in captivity when you can use your hand to create a

rhythm and they will follow that and anticipate your next move.

So they get rhythm.

Now for our listeners, can you explain how scientists gather information about whale

and dolph sounds in the wild, and also versus in captivity?

Yeah. So in the wild, they will typically do

field research where they will follow a group.

When they find the group that they're

studying, studding, they will drop a hydrophone into the water,

or an array of hydrophones, which is basically an underwater microphone.

And they're able to capture and record

their vocalizations, or their sounds, that way.

How big are these hydrophones?

They're not, necessarily, exceedingly big.

But some people use arrays , and that's important because it helps

you to triangulate where is the sound coming from.

And in captivity, pretty much the same thing.

You drop a hydrophone into the tank and you record their sounds.

The thing of it is that once you record

sounds, then you can do lots of fancy things with them because right now we're

using machine learning and AI and all kinds of ways of analyzing the sounds

they make to find patterns that maybe we, with our brains, cannot necessarily find.

And that's pretty exciting.

So that is a perfect segue into my next question, which is you were featured in

the 2013 documentary Blackfish about killer whale captivity.

From what you've studied, why do you think humans undervalue animal intelligence?

Oh, I think we undervalue animal intelligence for a couple of reasons.

One, for very deep reasons, meaning that we like to be on top.

We like to think that we're exceptional,

that we're not really part of the animal kingdom.

So that's a very deep seeded, unconscious kind of thing.

I am not an animal.

The other reason, which goes along with

that, is that it's convenient for us to downplay their intelligence because then

it allows us to justify doing some of the things we do to them.

So sad. And also that's a really apt point, just

about the power dynamic of like, yeah, if you just pretend that they can't be as

smart as us, then we don't have to be scared.

Yeah, and it certainly cuts us off from being able to learn a little bit more

about their sounds and what that might tell us.

And this speaks to your work, The Whale Sanctuary Project.

Yeah, we want to hear about it. Yeah.

Well, we've known for a long time now that

dolphins and whales do very poorly living in tanks in entertainment parks.

The science is in on that.

So when you know this, you think to

yourself, well, okay, so what can we do about it?

So I created the sanctuary, and I wasn't alone in doing that, to

create an alternative to keeping these animals in concrete tanks.

They can't be taken out of the tanks and dumped in the ocean, so what can we do?

We can create the very best scenario for

them, like chimpanzees, elephants, tigers, bears.

So a real sanctuary is a way to give back

to those animals who we've taken a lot from over the decades.

Yeah, that's so beautiful.

I mean, I love that you're offering that because I know for a fact, many people

took so much away from how much has been brought up since the Blackfish documentary

came out, involving the ethics of tank size and all that.

So I think it's so awesome the work that you're doing.

And I love that we get to hear about the fact that they are musical also.

Like, they have some personality. We love that!

Oh, definitely!

Right!

Thank you again to Dr. Marino for coming on the show, as well as

for all the work she's done at The Whale Sanctuary Project.

Yeah, seriously, seriously great work.

And now, to round out the episode, we have David Rothenberg.

David, thank you so much for coming here

on this podcast to join us and speak to us about what it is that you're doing.

How are you? I'm great.

Thanks for inviting me.

Oh, man, we're happy to have you.

Please introduce yourself and what it is you do.

My name is David Rothenberg.

Some people call me an inter species musician.

I play music with whales and birds and bugs and even plants sometimes.

When I'm not doing that, I'm a professor

of philosophy and music at the New Jersey Institute of Technology.

I've written a lot of books and made some films and recorded lots of music of this

type that we're going to be talking about today.

So I'm glad to be here. Awesome.

That was incredible!

That was awesome.

And so, you have a very unique and niche

market that you are in with your music, right?

You are - you said inter-species musician is how people have referred to it?

Sometimes, yes. I mean, one could say this

is a niche form of music, but you could also say that it really

represents all music because all music is from one animal to another.

And maybe we understand each other, maybe not.

Certainly, we've all played with human

musicians who have - we don't speak the same language figuratively, actually.

But sometimes music can be made

by people who cannot really communicate with each other any other way.

And I kind of expand that to include birds

and whales and try and make music with them.

Even though I can't talk to them, I don't

know what they're really thinking about, how they live.

But music can be made together.

I love that! I love that.

But so how did you get into this, then?

I would say as a kid, when my parents

moved us all from New York City to Connecticut.

I was kind of shy, I didn't really talk to

anybody, and wandered around the woods listening to sounds.

I felt at home there when I didn't have to deal with other kids.

And then when I was in high school, I

learned there was a musician, lived not so far away named Paul Winter.

He's a jazz musician who played with wolves and whales also.

And I said, "That's kind of cool." So I got to know him and then thought

about it for many years before I actually started doing it.

And there was another elder figure, the

Canadian and composer R. Murray Schafer,

who also would compose whole symphonies to be performed in the wilderness by a whole

orchestra out on a lake canoing, and trombonist sitting in the pine trees.

And this guy also pioneered the study of the soundscape.

We could listen to soundscapes like we

study landscapes, but we just hear what's out there.

I began to realize there was a small but dedicated group of people around the world

doing various versions of this kind of stuff.

This is a very, very cool thing that we're learning about right now, thank you!

Please tell us, you've mentioned some

before, but what are some of the creatures that you have performed alongside?

Well, I think I first did it with birds

because birds, many people recognize, are making music.

We say that birds have songs.

Some sounds from birds are songs, some are calls.

Why do we call these things songs?

We recognize they work the way music works.

And so I went with my friend Michael Pestle.

He was in Pennsylvania, of course, in Pittsburgh, home of the National Aviary.

It's this amazing collection of birds out there.

And Michael was a professor, at this time, of art.

He said, "You got to come play with these birds." And I went there and played along.

Before the place opened, it was like 6 AM.

And one particular bird really wanted to play along with me.

He was a white-crested laughing thrush.

How do you play with that bird?

I'm walking around the aviary, I hear

birds going, "Rah", "meeeew", and "do do do do do, meep boo."

And I play my clarinet "boop, do do", as if I'm with a bunch of musicians.

I can't talk to them.

They don't speak my language, but they're making music, maybe I could fit in.

I like doing that with human musicians, too, from all over the world.

And so with birds like, oh, this one bird really started to get interested.

I said, hmmm, that's kind of cool.

And that's when I realized you actually

could learn something by playing live with birds.

So that was the beginning of this journey.

(clip of David playing with the white-crested laughing thrush plays)

Started with The laughing thrash, took me to Australia to meet probably the greatest

of all singing birds, the Superb Lyrebird, LYRE Bird, named

after his tail shaped like a lyre, this harp that they played in ancient Greece.

This is like the super bird.

Looks like a Peacock.

It's like a cartoon character.

(clip of David playing with the Supurb Lyrebird plays)

You may know the most popular clip of any

David Attenborough BBC Nature series is the film of this lyre bird.

The very same one I played with, actually.

The exact same one! Did you use your clarinet or was it another instrument?

I played clarinet.

The clarinet is a very versatile instrument.

It can go a lot with birds, but possibly flutes are even better.

I also play other things.

I play the iPad, playing electronic sounds

, that's also useful, particularly with insects.

I play a lot with insects, most famously 17 year cicadas.

A lot of people think it's just noise, but I would say it's the most classic

classical music out there, what animals are doing, has been around for millions of

years before there were humans on this planet.

(Clip of David playing with the 17 year cicadas plays)

This is the oldest music we know.

There must be something right about it if it's lasted this long.

Who knows if anything human is going to last that long, as long as a katydids

singing, "ch-ch-ch, ch-ch-ch", or a nightingale, or a robin, even.

Any bird.

They've been around a long time, so we ought to respect them.

We ought to respect what they're doing.

And how do you adjust your playing, or you're learning, or your listening when

you're playing with these different creatures or animals?

How do you adjust? How do you prepare?

That's a good question.

I try and learn what their whole aesthetic sense is.

Like even Charles Darwin knew that birds like music, they appreciated beauty.

And he wrote that birds have a natural

aesthetic sense, which means they know what's right for them.

And each species has their own way of doing things.

And you can learn what that is by spending time with them.

And of course, they don't need any humans making music with them.

They don't need human music.

But they're interested in sounds, and they

can sometimes be very interested in what they hear a human musician play.

And it's not just me playing clarinet.

I bring other people in, playing all kinds of other instruments.

We try and play together with these birds, and honestly, learn from them.

Also, it's much more fun for me to be out

in the wilds, making music with animals where they live.

But of course, I also take their sounds,

record them and manipulate them and do that kind of activity.

And I also teach students to do that, because it's so fun.

But that's, I think, much less interesting than really going out there and being in

that world of animals where you don't necessarily belong, you're not used to

being and get out of your human comfort zone to this new world.

What's the furthest you've gone out to play with the species?

Maybe the furthest out of our civilized comfort zone that you've gone?

Probably to Arctic Russia in 2006 when I went to play with beluga

whales in Karelia, which is a part of Russia nobody ever hears about.

It's north of St.

Petersburg and east of Finland.

And we went to the White Sea.

And there I met all these Russian

scientists, and we sat there and made music with the whales.

And later I visited them in Moscow and

learned all this stuff about Russian beluga science.

And beluga whales are very curious about people.

They're like big dolphins.

They come out of the water and make noise and such.

(Clip of David playing with beluga whales plays)

They're very interactive with us.

But previously, I'd practiced in an

aquarium in Chicago, at the Shed Aquarium, and you could get belugas to make very

specific sounds similar to what the clarinet could do.

And some of those exact sounds was what I heard with the wild belugas in Russia.

So what about when you perform live for a human audience?

Do you use recordings?

Do you bring the audience out in nature with you?

How does that look? Both of those things.

I'm traveling around Europe right now.

We're doing concerts live with birds.

And so first I started in Slavia and we

did one evening concert and that was by a beautiful lake, Lake Cernitskaya.

And that was a lot of frogs were singing in the lake in the evening and birds came

out, and we had a harpist from Portugal, a singer from Slovenia, and me.

And together we spent several days rehearsing.

How did we rehearse? We just imagined what we might do with

birds, played some bird sounds and talked a lot.

And then we did that concert.

And then another morning we got up at dawn.

We really got up at 3 AM and left at 3:30 and drove 40 minutes to this big meadow.

We actually hauled the harp about 30 minutes across the field to this

spot that was perfect as the sun was coming up.

Nightingales were still singing from night

time, and all black birds and different European thrushes and other birds.

European birds sound a lot more like classical music than American birds.

You can see and hear how this music of Bach, Beethoven, Mahler, Messiaen,

all evolved in these particular birds making certain sounds.

It's remarkable to hear that.

I've done some other events with poetry, particularly poetry from Iran and Persia,

which is all about nightingales and emotion, love, and birds. Like there's a

whole tradition, nightingales are all over Persian poetry.

Lately, I've been playing concerts with underwater pond creatures.

People don't know that a pond makes such cool sounds.

You get a hydrophone, you drop it down,

and there's a whole world that already sounds like electronic music.

You don't have to do anything to it.

(clip of David playing with underwater pond creatures)

Give us some tips to listen and learn from nature.

The first thing is to stop talking!

Be silent, clear your mind out.

Go out in the woods. It could be anywhere.

Go out in the street.

Nature's right here in the city. Go outside.

The traffic's here, there are people, but

there's also other sounds that come from animals.

And can you always tell what's a human sound?

What's a nonhuman sound?

If you can, try and figure out what that

is, and try and figure out what these animals are doing.

If it sounds like music to you, if it's a bird singing, why is it singing?

What is musical, exactly?

Do you hear a rhythm?

Do you hear a beat? Do you hear a melody?

Do you hear emotions? Do you hear feelings?

We feel like we humans believe that music

carries emotion and can express emotions that can be said no other way.

Talking about them, turning them into

words is not the same as what the music conveys.

Are these other sounds conveying the same

thing, even though they may be made by other species?

And then if you feel inspired to join in, do so very slowly, carefully.

Leave a lot of space for the other

musicians in the forest, in the street, in the field.

Don't fill in all the sonic space.

You fill in your own niche among the

ecological possibilities that other species are there for.

Maybe they don't need you?

They probably don't want you there!

Make them want you there by just enjoying the dialog and the interaction.

And that's how you get

animals to realize that we might be able to live together on this planet.

We're not going to be destroying each other.

That's the secret.

Yeah. And you know, speaking of the planet

as a whole, do you feel that climate change has affected some of the sonic

soundscapes that you've encountered over the years?

Like can you hear a difference?

Well, one story I have to tell is the other day I was playing with the pond

sounds in Brooklyn with this great Swiss bass clarinetist named Sha.

We had two bass clarinets, he's a famous guy.

We're playing with the pond sounds.

And this bird appears.

He goes, "What's that?" I go, "I'm embarrassed.

I don't know what it is." It looks like a

mutant cormorant, but we're in Brooklyn in Prospect Park.

There's alligators in this lake.

Anything can be here.

So I'm sorry, I don't know what it is.

And the other day in the New York Times,

there was a front page story about this bird, which was an anhinga, otherwise

known as a water turkey that lives in Florida and Georgia, and they're starting

to fly up to New York, just showing you climate change.

The warmer planet is making the birds change.

So certainly a warmer planet changes the

ecology, that also changes the acoustic ecology.

And so you're getting different creatures, different sounds, different moods.

So yeah, climate change is affecting

everything about what's going on in nature.

And I don't know how my work is going to

help us do any more about this, except anything that connects people more to

nature makes us appreciate how much we're interconnected with nature.

That's not small at all. That's huge.

Very huge. It's important.

Wonderful. Wow.

Well, thank you for everything.

I mean, this was awesome.

That was so cool, what you do!

It's been wonderful chatting with you and thank you so much.

Oh yes, thanks a lot!

Thanks again, David, for sharing

your story and music with us.

All right, so Bey, as a musician, if you

were going to take a page from David's book and make a song with an

animal species what creature do you think is going to compliment you the best?

I don't know about complimenting me, but

an animal that I absolutely would make a song with?

A wolf. Oh, my God.

That's such a good answer! You know?

Howling at the moon? Okay.

Damn. Throw some auto tune on it?

I would listen to it. All right.

So be sure to join us next week for the penultimate episode of this season, when

we learn all about the science of musical performance.

From singing, to jazz improvisation, to

elementary school class concerts, we've got you covered.

So I didn't only teach notes and words

words to songs, I taught this is how we make a line.

This is how the line moves to the stage.

This is how we step up onto the choir risers.

Here's how to stand safely on choir risers.

I tried to teach them to look like you belong there.

Look like you belong on a stage.

Look like you are a performer.

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This podcast is made in partnership with

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This podcast is produced by Amy Carson.

The Franklin Institute's director of digital editorial is Joy Montefusco.

Dr.

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