John Cage Turns 100

John Cage turns 100 on September 5th. We are celebrating at Thomas More with two student-led performances of 4'33''. More later.http://johncage.org/2012/

Noise Pollution Evolution: City Bird and Country Bird

     A new study featured in Discovery Magazine aimed to examine the effects of urban cacophony on house sparrows— you know, those ubiquitous songbirds that seem to hang out in every urban area. The Conclusion: urban noises can interfere with the calls between songbirds and their chicks. Makes sense. But what does it mean? Parents who can't hear and thus respond to their offspring can't be the best parents, meaning that chicks reared in the city are less healthy than their counterparts chirping and fluttering around in bucolic bliss.
    The study was performed by the University of Sheffield's Julie Schroeder, who found that loud noises drown out communication between mother house sparrows and their chicks, including the calls chicks make to beg for food. Only a handful of other studies have examined the effect of loud noises on songbirds mating and nesting habits, though none have quite tackled the serious maternal questions raised long ago in Dr. Seuss's seminal work, Are You My Mother? Sheffield's study is also made unique by the fact that she focused on a well-known group of sparrows living on Lundy Island, in Devon, England. These sparrows regularly trade swap their eggs among nests, which results in some parents raising chicks they're not related to (and I find myself wondering if all sparrows do this, or if it's just a British thing). This kid-swapping helped researchers separate the effect of a sparrow's parentage from the effect of its environment, just in case the genetically weaker sparrows were somehow more prone to doing something stupid... like live next to a roiling electrical generator, which is exactly what some of them were doing.
     The generators on Lundy Island (built in 2001) run continuously from 6 to 9 pm and emit 70 decibels of noise. Schroeder compared the nest boxes located in the generators' noise zone to nests located in a quieter zone. She found that, while the noise has no real effect on the health of adult birds (female birds could even lay the same number of eggs), it did adversely affect their offspring. Though chicks in quiet areas had a 25 percent chance of living long enough to fledge (such are the harsh realities of birdy life), the chicks in noisy areas had only a 21 percent chance. Plus, those urban chicks weighed less than their country counterparts, most likely, Schroeder believes, because mother birds visited their chicks less often and provided them with less food.
     The fact that adult birds seemed in fine health led Schroeder to single out noise as the culprit in the weakness of urban chicks, since, say, if air pollution had been stunting chick growth, adults would have been unhealthy too. Researchers suspect these findings may help explain the house sparrow's sudden disappearance in Western Europe and North America. "If what we suggest takes place in big cities too," she says, "it is likely to play an important role in the sparrow population dynamic, and is probably one cause of the dramatic population crash that we are currently observing." Discovery Magazine reminds us that the exact cause of the chicks' undernourishment is still uncertain — there may very well be a barrier between mother and chick communication in urban areas or loud noises may scare off  insects the birds eat.

It's probably pretty important, though, for us to keep track of the plight of these songbirds, lest -God forbid!- the pigeon become the only bird we can look forward to seeing on our stroll to work in the big city

Endangered Silence

This week at OnBeing.org, host Krista Tippet talks with sound ecologist Gordon Hempton about vanishing soundscapes and "silence" as an endangered species.


"Our cities, our suburbs, our farm communities, even our most expansive and remote national parks are not free from human noise intrusions. Nor is there relief even at the North Pole; continent-hopping jets see to that. Moreover, fighting noise is not the same as preserving silence. Our typical anti-noise strategies — earplugs, noise cancellation headphones, even noise abatement laws — offer no real solution because they do nothing to help us reconnect and listen to the land. And the land is speaking." -Hempton, Sounds of Silence


The proliferation of human sound pollution to even the most remote regions of the world is discussed via the metaphor of disease and, recalling the warning of Robert Koch, developer of the scientific method that identifies the causes of disease, Hempton believes that "the unchecked loss of silence is a canary in a coal mine-a global one. If we cannot make a stand here, if we turn a deaf ear to the issue of vanishing natural quiet, how can we expect to fare better with more complex environmental crises?"

Though I'm not sure Cage would have employed so passionate and aggressive a metaphor, I'm sure he would share the sentiment. Human-made sounds are wonderful and technologies offer so much potential for something new and exciting, but humans must not lose sight of the natural sounds which already characterize the natural world -and which face extinction if neglected. Perhaps some "4:33 intervention" is needed. We need to recognize the soundscapes that nature offers us before seeking to improve upon them. 


You can download the podast of Tippet's interview with Hempton here.

Pachyderm Prodigy

When caretakers at the Smithsonian National Zoological Park noticed that Shanthi, an Asian elephant, tended to use her body in musically rhythmic ways, someone got the bright idea to give her an instrument. Guess what? Shanthi developed a panache for the harmonica and learned to play horns, too. You can see s video of one of her "concerts" here.

Awkward Silence?

     National Public Radio's show, All Things Considered, has been doing a series called "Why Music Matters."This week, they did this great feature on dancer and choreographer Amy O'Neal, who took on the challenge of dancing in complete silence. Ahem, I'm not going to say that it hasn't been done before because, ahem, yours truly undertook her own similar experiment, but it was intriguing to get another dancer's take on the experience.
       "I had to do a performance a couple years ago where I couldn't use any music," O'Neal says. "I had 15 minutes without sound. I felt like, OK, well, I need to have some kind of circumstances to deal with — so I asked people to bring me different outfits to wear. I would end up changing out there and sort of embodying whatever outfit it was that they had brought in."  O'Neal says that although she liked the idea at first, seeing video of her performance was not what she had expected.
      "When I saw the video I was like — oh my god, why are you doing that? You're just doing that because you're nervous about it being quiet," O'Neal says. Aha! Dancers are notoriously afraid of the "awkward silence," from my own experience, and O'Neal's insights seem to support this. "These questions came up: Is music a crutch for me? Why do I have to have it? Why can't I just be up there alone?" Yeah. Been there, sister. You dedicate so much time and energy to your craft, and you don't see why it shouldn't be able to stand alone, but then it does, and you feel so naked without the music.
      "There's an inherent tension and beauty in silence," she adds. "Things really aren't ever silent — there's always something, whether it be your breath or somebody coughing. But then, when music happens, everything sort of becomes alive."
     What I want to know is when this "music happens." And what is the state of things when they aren't "alive."

Scruggs Style

Earl Scruggs, bluegrass legend, died this past Wednesday at age 88. Famous for his three-fingered banjo-style, he defined the bluegrass sound as we have come to know it today. Adding syncopation to the banjo and giving it almost a jazz-like approach, the style was even named "Scruggs style." How cool is that? I need a "style" named after me...

National Public Radio did a piece on his life and legacy here.

Equestrian Orchestra

The summer Olympic games are taking place in London this year.

I knew that.

Dressage is an equestrian sport people will be competing in.

I knew that too.

Composer Tom Hunt is at work with members of a British team to compose music for the horses, paying careful attention to what each event calls for and, more importantly, what each specific horse will best respond to.

I didn't know that.

Mr. Hunt says that, when composing such pieces, you have to establish what sort of music the horse can respond to, just like you might do with people. What does this mean? Well, he explains that, if you have a big strong horse, you might want to use a big orchestral arrangement. But if you have a fun horse with more dainty movements and friendly characteristics, you might go for pop.

Some pretty interesting, beautiful and even epic original pieces have been composed for these horses, all for their various events. When asked if he thinks the horses express a preference for his work, Hunt says that he'd like to think that the horses are responding to the music because it's been designed with them in the mind. According to him, he never composes music that isn't going to suit them.

If you ask me, I think they might be a rather thankless audience. But then, I don't have a dancing horse.