Songbirds showed mankind how to whistle melody, in Major and Minor scales, while horses (and other domestic quadrupeds) helped steady the rhythms of the human heart and the instinctual drive to drum, by throwing down a 4/4 beat.

Humans are born to drum, before they could even talk, they slapped the membranophones of their own bodies, as a form of communication, just like other primates. Gorillas punch paradiddles into their chests. Chimpanzees drum on tree trunks. Rhesus macaque monkeys are known to bang rhythmically on their cages. Why even rats like to tap out little paw beats on the ground.

All of the various drums of a modern day rock kit are just lying around the Earth, waiting to be picked up and played. Walk into any forest, pick up a pair of sticks, and head over to a log drum and start hitting. Try scraping some rocks together. Stir that rhythmic salad with small circular steps in the dirt, just like brushes on a snare drum. Need some cymbals? Just go find a small body of water and splash those crashes. Wait for a good storm, and we be jammin’ with the Gods.

4/4 Legs good, 2/4 Legs good too

But where in all of the chaotic rumblings of the sky and sea, did a steady beat finally emerge? The birds would be no help with establishing time and tempo, as their songs were spurtive and free, with much of the music found in the rests; between the notes. Insect musicians might have inspired some, as many stridulators like crickets, chirp in an even pulsing beat, but in a field, or a forest, where the insect choruses thicken, their beats smear into a single rhythmless drone.

Early man would hear her own heart, shuffling time along slowly at a Larghetto tempo, establishing down-beat and up-beat with a “lub, dub” iambic pattern. Her own ambulation would establish a basic cut-time marching beat feel, but human feet are soft and can barely compete with the cloven rim shots of quadrupeds. Plus, humans are bipedal and walk in a 2/2 time signature.

The horse and her four gaits, clopping passed at a steady 4/4 time on four legs, walking Andante and galloping Allegro, originated the schizophonic delusion that a divine drumming presence pounded forth from all things, the animals themselves, and the Earth itself, in a 4-beat measure.

Hipporhythmics

Today we’re going to learn all about Hipporhythmics, a branch of Eurythmy. ‘Hippo’, as in horse, not hippopotamus. We will see how the four legs of a moving quadruped create distinct rhythmic patterns and tempos. Then we’ll transcribe their gaits into human drum beats, playable with four limbs on a modern day rock drum kit. In other words, we’ll try to play drums like a horse. Just turn your speakers to a comfortable volume, and click on the black noteheads.

The first horse beat is known as the Walk. At slower tempos, the Walk sounds like a shuffle, and at faster tempos, the Walk sounds like a straight and even roll of 16th notes.

The horse walks by stepping on her hind leg, followed on the same side by the front leg, and then repeated on the opposite side (Right Hind, Right Front, Left Hind, Left Front). The front legs provide the down beats, while the hind legs provide up-beats. This shuffle beat is exactly like the swung tattoo of our hearts. Clock time, at 60 beats per minute, matches the tempo of our hearts, as well as that of a slow ambling horse.

The Trot is a little more up-tempo than the Walk, and fits into a 2/4 time signature like our own two-legged gait. However, because of the fast tempo, the feel is straight (like a fast walk) and not swung like the Walk Shuffle.

The horse trots in diagonal leg pairs, stepping on her hind leg and the opposite front leg at the same time, followed by the other hind leg and the opposite front leg (Right Hind + Left Front, Left Hind + Right Front). The trot, at 90 to 120 bpm, is the cut-time of human heart beats and clock beats.

The Canter is distinguishable from the 4-beat Walk, and the 2-beat Trot, by virtue of its 3 beats. The time signature can still be anything―4/4, 2/4, or 1/1―but the feel is straight. The down-beat is preceded by two 16th notes, sounding like the classic “William Tell Overture”. In poetry, this metrical foot of two short syllables, followed by a long syllable, is called an ‘anapest’.

In the Canter, the horse steps down on a hind leg, followed by the other hind leg and the opposite front leg at the same time, and finally accented with the other front leg (Right Hind, Left Hind + Right Front, Left Front).

The last horse gait is the up-tempo Gallop. The Gallop is a steady triplet pattern with a rest in between. As the horse moves faster and the tempo increases, the rest in between triplets also increases in duration. This horse beat is of particular importance to the development of human drumming, as it showcases how lickety-quick tempos can be broken up into a swing or shuffle feel―with blazing 3-legged triplets on the up-beats, leading into a swift 1-legged down beat. It is similar to the classic katydid triplet.

The horse gallops just like the canter, except the second beat is split into two. Leading with the Right Hind, she steps down on the Left Hind, followed by the Right Front, and ending on the Left Front.

So there you have it―the four horse beats of the apocalypse. The Walk inspired 4/4 time signatures, while the Trot revealed cut-time and straight feel. The Canter, increased the tempo further, and cemented the steady even 16th note feel, with strong representative up and down-beats. The Gallop, took the shuffling heart beat, and shredded it over fast tempos, straight feels, and 4/4 times.

How to Play Drums like a Horse

If you are non-local and can’t take our weekly Hipporhythmics class at the VFW, then feel free to take advantage of our free instructional home widget below. Just take your feet and your hands and use them to stomp the floor and slap your hams respectively. Using Hipporhythmics, we can absorb the horse’s power, almost as if we were eating the horses themselves! Children taught Hipporhythmics at an early age (like really early [intrauterine even]), can hambone twice as fast as the other kids, and a million times faster than your grandpa―Juba the Kid.

Music Definition

John Cage called it the ‘art of noise’, but then his most famous song is four and half minutes of silence. The “noise” part seems a little too much like a Duchamp toilet Fountain, and the “art” part is a little too je ne sais fart.

Actually, Music is a wide spread phenomenon in several living species apart from man, which calls into question any definition of music, and more widely that of man and her culture, as well as the idea we have of the animal herself.

So, we’ll just call it some kind of emotional sound, for now. Emo-sound. Yeah; that’s good.

Afterall, music doesn’t even have to be conscious. Take a line from DJ Drowsy Dream: “I make music in ma’ sleep / Spittin’ Z’s and snorin’ leafs”.

Or as Debussy said, “Music is what happens in between the hooves.”






Hello, Goodbye

I hope you enjoyed this bout with pseudoscience and musical hallucination. If you’d like to see Hipporhythmics taught in public schools, please donate to the Los Doggies Musical Literacy Foundation. Thank you.

The White-throated Swallow roughly sings a Perfect Fourth (E), down a semitone to a Major (D#) Third, and down a major third to the Root (B). The classic acoustic chord B Major (add 11) will encompass all of these tones. In the slowed down version, you can clearly hear that the second note is sharp and doesn’t quite go down to the D# proper. Thus, the Sparrow’s Major Third is a lot larger than our modern interval, and more akin to the ancient spacious Pythagorean Third. The feel of the song is swung, with the one presumably falling on the “Sweet” followed by triplets of “Canadas”.

A second song has yet to be given lyrics. Just like in “Oh Sweet Canada”, the tonality has a strong Major Third interval, except in the song below there is a Minor outro.

The White-throated Sparrow’s wordless tune is a lot like the chicken’s cock-a-doodle-doo melody. They would make great incidental harmonies together.

Epilogue:
Apparently, birds have a Song Control System (SCS) hidden somewhere in the brain cells of their Consciousness (CNSC). Endless experiments may confirm the existence of a Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) and quite possibly the hotly pursued Selfy Self (SELF2).

Here’s a POV beakshot of a sparrow in full song.

They often bend down a whole tone to a G, as if being swept up in the Doppler winds. The scale of A Mixolydian (A B C# D E F# G), with its Dominant 7th (G), will work nicely with the blue jays calls. Follow this link, to hear how this bird might be played on guitar.

With his harsh hawk cries, guitar-licking wheedlelee’s, and tintinnabulating toolool toolool’s, the blue jay is a perfect candidate for a rocking tribute. To hear such a cover, head over to the Boird Band bandcamp site

Blue jays live by blue jay ways. They are often featured on Animal Television’s “Most Bad-Ass Bird” or what have you. They are known to chase cars like dogs, and steal kibble from dogs. While other birds are content to sing and whistle, blue jays shoot their beaks off all day.

They also appear in the first sentence of Vineland by Tommy Pynch in this particularly relevant passage, as some kind of metaphor or something.

Rock on bird-brains.

They call to you in 1-note songs like crickets, then disappear every time you are near. It’s almost a 4/4 beat―keeping time like a heartbeat and other natural metronomes, sometimes approaching clockbeat click-track perfection if only for a measure, but usually tempoless and free like laundromat rhythms.

In a field of crickets, their staccato chirps smear together into one thick wavering drone. Imagine the male citizens of your country all singing together like this, in a field.

This is a field cricket who chirps in D, the kind I usually hear out my window. They play with their wings and hear with their legs. They dig amps into the Earth, all to impress the ladies.

Trill, rest, trill, rest, like Verse-Chorus-Verse. Each trill is perceived as a single tone, sometimes a D, sometimes flat or sharp. Sometime D natural straight-up. Concert D.

If we slow down their song 2 octaves, we can see each trill hovers around D and C#. Crickets fire off a quick burst of staccato wingtones and then rest for about the same amount of time, creating a pulsing beat.

If we slow it down yet another 2 octaves, we can see each single tone in the trill actually bends down from D to C#, and sometimes back up again. Plus, there are even smaller rests between these individual tones of the trill.

So not only is he hitting D’s and C#’s in lickety-quick trills, but he also bends each single tone between these two tones. There is a kind of holophonic [sic] principle at play here, whereby each tone contains the whole. While we hear a collection of single tones jumping up and down a half step, each perceived tone is made of many shorter tones that also jump up and down a half step, and finally, each of these shorter tones also bends up and down a half-step―a triple-tiered semitonal holophonic bug song of love.

Like any chirp tune enthusiast, I keep a cricket in a cage…
Can I play.

Such pacing and portamento! Drag over the noteheads below to hear the rooster played on a rhodes.

I hear it in 3/4 time, like the heartbeat. Afterall, cocks are known to waltz. The notes of the rooster’s crow fit neatly into one obscure scale – F Half Whole, also know as F Octatonic for its 8 notes, 1 more degree than the usual Diatonic 7-note Major/Minor scales.

The rooster hits the first four notes. The F is his tonic root which he begins and ends on. The A and Ab flirt with Major to Minor modulation – the picardy. Though the Octatonic scale is almost absent from Pop Music (with a couple of Los exceptions), the Half Whole interval movement is found in the Radiohead song “Just”. Just listen for the ascending lead guitar line in the intro. It actually follows the reverse of the above, rising a Whole Tone and then a Half-tone.

Why do roosters crow? Why do wine glasses sing? Where do Rock ‘n’ Roll babies come from? All of these questions and more will find their answers here at the Los Doggies Musical Literacy Foundation.

And please do be kind to your chicken friends!

The wren’s song is a lot like other birdsong, with its choppy frantic pacing, modulating phrases, and rhythmic suprises. The first two notes form a Major 6 interval, and sound very similar in pitch and feel to the cardinal’s “purdy”. Below, you can hear how the wren sounds with a musical instrument playing along – a veritable ‘cover’.

On the right, is a sonogram of the song. This is how scientists visualize it. The blue lines denote the males, and red lines denote the females. A double-line is the double-tracked vocals of two wrens in synchronicity. In typical scientific fashion, the authors attempt to reduce these beautifully complex duets to sex and violence.

This must be one of the most complex singing performances yet described in a non-human animal…Why then do the members of a group join to produce a complex chorus? The two hypotheses most commonly put forward for duetting are mate guarding and mutual territorial defence (Hall 2004)…The latter is more plausible, particularly as playback leads chorusing birds to gather round the speaker. The close presence of several birds singing in a coordinated fashion is then very obvious to a human observer and could be especially intimidating to intruding wrens.

I wonder how we would fare under such scientific inquiry, were the motives of human artists reduced to “fucking” and “fighting” or any of the other Biological F’s? A famous pop singer who only plays sold-out stadium gigs, could said to be “only in it for the money”, but this says nothing of the enjoyment of performing music. If these birds suffered alone with their songs, starving and friendless, Vincent van Gogh-like, would their musical motives be more admirable?

Wrens aren’t mere Darwinian machines. They sing for the fuck of it. Just like us. At least I think we do. To be sure we might just have to kidnap little Justin Bieber, puncture his brachial vein for blood samples, color-ring his neck for easy gender recognition, and then show up at his house with boom-box held overhead, blaring out his enemy’s music.

His trills sound like “turr, turr, turr”, the onomatopoeia that named him. The first trill bends up from C to C#, and the other two bend down from C# to C. In musical notation, a trill is written like so:

A trill is a rapid alteration of adjacent notes. The turtle dove trills notes within a semitone. Like all birds, he is working at a much quicker musical pace than us. In a single trill, he’ll hit 15 or so notes, but the three phrases essentially follow the “up, down, down” movement as indicated above. Up, down, down, rest. Up, down, down, rest. Isn’t it such a dovey thing to mournfully slide down your final note?

If James Joyce were writing this, he’d pun up like this and call it a day:

“On a recent visit to Asolo, to see the composer Malipiero, I was strongly reminded of D’Annunzio. Malipiero has a most extraordinary and not entirely un-D’Annunzian house himself, a fine Venetian building on a hillside. One enters under a Latin inscription and plunges into darkest night. The dark is in deference to pairs of owls who, from covered cages in obscure corners, hoot the two notes,

in tune with Malipiero’s piano after he plays them. There is evidence in the garden of affection for other of God’s feathered creatures: chickens have been buried in marked graves; Malipiero’s chickens die of old age.”

Reading this little passage so many years ago, I realized animals can make notes as well. Not just sounds, but music too. Non-human animal music is as glorious as any human, aleatoric, or industrial music.

The breakup of the narrative with a single little score, provided the inspiration for the blog you’re reading now. Notes and text, side by side, like they used to be, when poetry was sung. When Beowulf was a Pop Song.

I’m not sure what kind of owls Malipiero kept on his property, as his personal strigine piano tuners, but they apparently hooted a high Eb and D over and over (Drag over the score above). That’s a semitone interval, the very smallest interval there is.

Think of Igor, entering this strange manor, under moonlight, with the portamento winds blowing, and two bassy owls taunting the poor Russian with their darkling semitones. Not unlike, Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, a completely semitonal score featuring F’s and F#’s.

Music begins with fear, and because of this fear there is dread, as of a curse. Then I add the weariness, and because of the weariness there is compliance. I end it all with the confusion and because of the confusion there is stupidity. And because of the stupidity there is the Way, the Way that can be lifted up and carried around wherever you go.

Seriously though! Bees sing B Sharps (C), and Flies sing F Sharps (F#). What’s next, the Beatles’ entire catalog is discovered, tabbed out on the walls of a French cave?

Yes, there will be a field guide.
And please do be kind to your fly friends. Just blow, and she’ll fly away.