Try rolling the mouse back and forth between the male and female to hear what a whole tone flock sounds like, a-honking and a-hinking. While the ornithologist might be content with recording goose song (not to mention, tagging and bagging the musicians), maybe even releasing an album: Sounds of the Pond, expecting listeners to hear the ‘Sounds’ as Music (since it’s playing back on a polycarbonate disc after all), the zoomusicologist might find herself, stalking said pond, trolling its shores, with a small field guitar in hand, ready to maintain jam-eostasis with an F9 Chord. Try dropping a few F9-bombs, and then lay a few a-honks and a-hinks on top.

Go here, to hear a rocking rendition of the Goose song by Boird Band.

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.

In the cloud forest, where the fog cover trumps vision, you are more likely to hear a Quetzal than see one. Their song is a plaintive kyow that is often compared to the whimper of a puppy. The kyows are performed in call and answer form by males and females (Remember this is the Neotropics where the girls sing too). They seem to follow a simple pattern, where alternating kyows fall in smaller intervals. The first call goes down a Perfect Fifth, and the smaller second call only goes down a Fourth. There are also high E Tones, like appoggiaturas, that precede each kyow.

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: