Original subtitles

The song of the nightingale -

one of the most beguiling sounds in all nature.

Its haunting musical quality has inspired generations of artists

and musicians.

The latest is David Rothenberg.

He's a New Age philosopher and jazz musician,

and he makes the ultimate claim -

that birdsong doesn't just sound like music,

it IS music.

It has the formal properties of music

and, like human music,

it's motivated by pleasure.

But his idea that birds sing for joy has been scorned by scientists,

who favour their own, more rational explanations.

It's a fight between two ideologies, with science in one corner and art in the other.

I think science and art work different ways when it comes to birdsong.

Science doesn't have the upper hand in figuring out

what birdsong is about. One approach picks up on some things, misses out on others.

I don't think David has thought through as to what the mechanism might be,

if his birds sing for joy.

He's just making some unscientific declarations

that insult my birds, and indirectly, that bothers me.

This is a leap right into the eagle's nest

of disagreement and suspicion,

and we have some scientists who think I'm just an interloper,

playing music with the careful subjects of their research.

Now, Pied Piper David is on a mission to show music is as important as science

in our understanding of why birds sing.

The morning chorus is just pure joy, really, isn't it?

You hear that bursting into life...

Almost like a piece of music,

it starts quietly and then builds up.

It's never going to be the same performance twice.

Pretty good, really.

I love to wake up and hear that outside,

and it's deafening sometimes.

It really sounds like they're singing for the sake of it.

Of all the sounds found in nature, none has proved as bewitching as birdsong.

Dogs may bark and cows may moo,

but it's birds that have inspired poets and composers.

And David Rothenberg has taken the notion that birdsong is musical

to its extreme.

I believe that birdsong isn't just like music, it IS music.

Science struggles to define exactly what music is.

But David thinks he knows.

Music is a bunch of sounds put together

that need to be performed in a specific way

where the meaning is just in the performance -

you can't say what each part means.

But it's really the root of my belief

that each species has its own kind of music, its own aesthetic.

Not surprisingly, the scientists scoff at his aesthetic notions.

They believe that birds sing for two basic evolutionary reasons -

and making music has got nothing to do with it.

Virtually everybody in the scientific world

believes that birds sing primarily to attract mates and repel rivals.

David doesn't deny this, but for him,

science can't explain the fact that some birds sing more than they need to,

even when the mating season is over and there are no rivals around.

It's this that makes him think they might actually sing because they enjoy it.

Why shouldn't they be singing for pleasure? Who are we to assume

that this kind of animal doesn't experience joy?

Birds sing because they're alive.

They have a million reasons to sing,

just like we do.

I think it's something they can do,

something they can do well,

and they enjoy it - why not?

David is now setting out on a long summer journey to explore and draw out the musical qualities

of birds.

He will meet fellow obsessives...

bizarre musicians...

and strip down for his art.

HE COOS

At the end of his trip, he will be granted an audience with the bigwigs of birdsong science

to try and gain a little respect.

Thoroughly wacky! Thoroughly wacky?

David's journey began in 2002,

when he went to Pittsburgh Aviary, just to see what would happen

if he played to the birds.

What occurred on that day was a revelation to him.

I really didn't expect much to happen,

but there were was a particular moment when I got the idea

that maybe there was something to birdsong worth investigating.

There I was, wandering with my clarinet through the aviary,

and one particular bird - a white-crested laughing thrush -

really seemed to respond to what I was doing, like he was jamming along with me.

The more he blew, the more it sang,

and the more he was convinced it was duetting with him.

I assumed, actually, that he was either thinking I was a female bird

or a potential rival, but the way he was responding

was very jamming-like - very much like music.

That was what I didn't expect.

This inter-species jamming session so excited David

that he embarked on a quest to commune with as many birds as possible.

Along the way, he wrote a book about why he thinks birds are making music.

Why Birds Sing has outsold many of the scientific books you'd find on the same shelves.

Clearly there are thousands of us who find his claims not just credible, but deeply appealing.

All right. Nice to meet you.

David Rothenberg lives in upstate New York,

where his day job is trying to teach philosophy to engineering students.

On the side, he composes avant-garde music inspired by the natural world.

.. A wood thrush, which you could have heard here a few months ago. You won't hear them now.

But he doesn't stop there. In his garden studio,

he spends hours studying the musicality of birds, with the help of sonograms.

These are visual representations of the frequency and rhythm of birdsong.

A sonogram is a way to objectively graph how high or low a sound is,

against how long it is, when you hear it. You can look at it,

and thereby have an accurate representation of what the sound is.

David has found all sorts of similarities between birdsong and human musical form.

To human ears, the wood warbler appears to end its song with a musical accelerando...

..the robin sings swelling crescendos...

..and the thrush, delicate diminuendos.

There are technical similarities too.

The hermit thrush can sing in a pentatonic musical scale,

used in Far Eastern music.

And the wood thrush is able to sing in a diatonic scale, the foundation of Western classical music.

With one particular birdsong, that of a veery...

.. David has found an even closer connection, by slowing it down to a tenth of its normal speed.

You're going to see something that looks kind of similar,

a little stretched out,

but what you hear is the same structure brought down into the human scale.

It's hard not to think it's somehow musical.

So there's rhythm, there's organisation, there's patterns.

It's really musical stuff going on.

For science, the fact that birdsong can be annotated musically

doesn't prove a thing.

I'm not sure that I would want to use the word music

in relation to birdsong,

because human music is qualitatively different from birdsong.

I don't think birds use scales in the same sense as we do, or anything like that.

You don't want to mix up two different things which are very distinct from one another.

Some birdsongs are beautiful to our ears, some are not.

And we have to realise that these birds are hearing differently than we are in the first place.

For the science world,

David's ideas are just woolly thinking, but he's determined to prove them wrong.

He's travelling to the UK

to spread his musical gospel.

His book is beginning to irritate British avian scientists.

Their work is based on rigorous scientific research,

producing a rational answer to explain why birds sing.

When we ask the question, "Why do birds sing?", the two big ones,

I think, are what causes it and what its function is.

Professor Peter Slater has been studying vocal communication in birds and mammals for over 30 years.

One of his recent publications was Ambient Noise, Motor Fatigue And Serial Redundancy In Chaffinch Song.

What causes it - things like hormones, time of day,

whether it's a nice day or not - all sorts of things that lead the bird to do it, that cause it to do it.

But one can also be asking the question of what function it has - why does the bird do it?

What's the point of it? Does it attract females?

With the majority of songbirds, the male does most of the singing in order to attract the best female.

The female chooses to mate with the male she thinks has the best song.

This is known as sexual selection.

There's plenty of evidence to show the link between songs and sex.

Scientists have recorded correlations

between peak song activity and peak egg laying.

Sexual selection

is evolutionary forces,

which determine how males develop

elaborate signals or ornaments,

such as birdsong,

or the long tail of a peacock,

and those develop because females prefer to mate with males that possess those traits.

Some birds have very sexually selected songs,

such as warblers or nightingales - they have songs which are very complex,

and females choose males which have the most complex songs.

And do female birds ever sing? In some species, female birds do sing -

for example, the European starling, the females sing, though not as much as the males -

and in some species, they duet.

Female and male will duet together to defend their territory.

The defence of territory is the other main evolutionary function of birdsong.

In a classic experiment,

scientists discovered male birds showed aggressive behaviour towards speakers playing rival birdsong.

So there we are - these are the two principal reasons why birds sing.

Birds sing primarily to attract mates and repel rivals.

But what of David's insistence that some birds sing much fancier and longer songs than they need to?

It's a useful thing to have a very elaborate song -

just like, perhaps, human beings, they don't like to be bored in conversation.

Females have a bias towards perceiving a complex signal

and prefer those males which have complex songs.

There's this awful thing called habituation.

If you tell the same funny story many times, the audience stops laughing.

If you sing the same song many, many times, the female may habituate to it and stop being interested.

So a male that produces a really varied repertoire

is likely to attract a female more than one with less of a repertoire.

We know this is the case in a number of species of bird -

the more varied your repertoire, the more likely you are to get a female.

As soon as you say that a song is more beautiful than it has to be,

or that the male is singing more than he has to,

I think you're insulting that female who has directed, silently,

this whole birdsong feast

that we listen to all summer long.

So for the scientists, birdsong's function is easily explained.

It's all about sex, territory

and passing your genes on to the next generation.

I'm not sure David Rothenberg is asking any of these questions.

I think his major interest is why birdsong is beautiful, and why it's musical.

I think they're more questions about human beings than they are about birds.

I think we know far more about why birds sing than we know about why humans sing.

# If all the young ladies were blackbirds and thrushes

# If all the young ladies were blackbirds and thrushes

# Then all the young men would go beating the bushes

# Fol-de-dol diddle-dol

# Diddle-dol-day

# If all the young ladies were ducks on the water

# If all the young ladies were ducks on the water

# Then all the young men would go swimming in after

# Fol-de-dol diddle-dol

# Diddle-dol-day

# If all the young ladies were rushes a-growing

# If all the young ladies were rushes a-growing

# Then all the young men would get scythes and go mowing

# Fol-de-dol diddle-dol

# Diddle-dol-day. #

For now, David's wings have been clipped by the scientific community.

So he's off to look for moral support from Simon Barnes,

Times sports writer and author of How To Be A Bad Birdwatcher.

So where are we, Simon? We're out in East Suffolk,

which is a very decent area for birds -

an area that's mostly arable farming and rough pasture.

We've a nice bit of copse in front of us,

where we get a few songbirds every year.

Why do you think birds sing?

Yes! I... well, I loved the core point of your book,

that there is no evolutionary reason why birdsong should be beautiful.

And I was absolutely enthralled by that,

because I've always loved birdsong

for the magic of it and the complexity of it and, of course,

for the beauty of it.

I don't understand why scientists

tend to believe that an animal,

in fulfilling its nature,

somehow should be far away from something like pleasure or enjoying the process.

Why is that more scientific than...?

I... I find that strange.

I mean, to talk about the emotional life of animals, or even the cultural transmission in animals,

puts you on dangerous ground. I understand by anthropomorphism because I'm an anthropos - a man.

That's how you understand things.

But scientists are terrified of that and shy away from it,

and try and put... I mean, there are aspects of life that don't work

in charts and pie charts and bar graphs and so forth.

Boosted by Simon's fervour,

David returns to his musical quest,

determined to discover the holy grail of human-bird duets.

He's off to the Thames Estuary to recreate a piece of history.

In 1924, the BBC organised what was to be its first ever outside broadcast.

It featured the acclaimed cellist and muse of Edward Elgar, Beatrice Harrison.

What was unique about this broadcast was that Harrison set up the cello in her Surrey garden

and was recorded duetting with that most romantic of all songbirds,

the nightingale.

The nightingale is the perfect bird for David to test his musical ideas,

as it sings its repertoire of over 300 songs alone in the evening,

when many other species are quiet.

CELLO AND NIGHTINGALE SONG PLAY

David has been alerted to a wood in Kent

where he hopes to repeat Beatrice Harrison's human-nightingale collaboration.

And this is quite an ancient woodland,

and it's home to a particularly special bird, the nightingale.

We've got about 15 pairs of nightingales breeding in the woodland here.

Do you think we might hear some today? of nightingale song a minute ago.

It's a very rich, mellow song,

and as we get towards the end of the day,

the song will be a bit more in stark relief.

To complete the recreation, cellist Andrea Hess is to don Beatrice's robes

and play her repertoire in an attempt to draw out and duet with the elusive songbird.

That's it. That's more or less it.

I'm very curious about birds and intonation,

because they never seem to sing out of tune.

How do they do it?

Musicians struggle always to be perfectly in tune,

and birds do it so effortlessly.

Not to be left out,

David has also dressed in Beatrice's magical robes, as part of the plan to lure out the nightingale.

Meanwhile, in tribute to Beatrice Harrison's most famous patron,

Andrea plays some Elgar to warm her and the birds up.

Initially, there's no response from the nightingale.

She has now been playing

for nearly two hours, and Andrea is ready to put down her bow

and give up the ghost, when suddenly...

TWITTERING RESPONSE

The nightingale is actually responding to the cello.

What I'm really trying to say is birds make music -

they're singing pieces of music,

and that we cannot explain it away by just saying what it's for.

Take the song of the nightingale - many different phrases,

many different rhythms. When it comes to complicated birdsongs,

scientists have been counting the wrong things. So far, what scientists tend to do

is count the number of different syllables and sounds you hear.

But they stop there.

What I'm interested in is how they're put together in a structured way,

like a piece of music.

MUSIC: Cello Concerto in E minor, Opus 85, by Edward Elgar

I think the creative potential of birdsong as musical material

is endless. In each generation,

we have different ideas of how human music works.

We're going to hear different things as being musical.

I think today, with the world of electronic music we live in,

strange sounds being increasingly appreciated,

a song like the nightingale's opens up new possibilities for us.

It starts to sound like a DJ scratching records.

And these rhythms are not limited to the music world.

The nightingale has also inspired the rustic poetry

of John Clare.

Clare brought an almost forensic accuracy to the depiction of the nightingale song in his poems.

It is this blending of science and art that has drawn David to Northamptonshire

to meet poet and Clare expert, Paul Farley.

So, Paul, here we are wandering through John Clare country.

Yes. This is the wood where Clare came to listen to the nightingales sing - the very wood.

Birdsong seems to have been quite important for Clare.

I think so. Clare's very different

from the other Romantic poets. He's often routinely bundled in

and called a Romantic, but in fact there's lots of differences between Clare's poetry

and that of somebody like, say, John Keats.

Um, Clare was much more interested in not just the song of the bird,

but the whole universe surrounding it, its habitat,

a description of the bird's nest and its eggs.

In a funny kind of way, he puts the song of the bird back into the bird's mouth.

The more I listened

And the more each note seemed sweeter than before

And aye so different was the strain

She'd scarce repeat the note again

Chew chew, chew chew

And higher still

Cheer cheer, cheer cheer

More loud and shrill

Cheer up, cheer up, cheer up

And dropped low

Tweet tweet, jug jug jug

And stopped.

John Clare's birdsong-inspired poetry was almost more scientific than Romantic,

combining phonetic and poetical language, rather like an early literary form of the sonogram.

Clare was way ahead of both scientists and composers and musicians.

He was turning human language towards nightingale sounds

when he wrote down in his notebook, "Chew cheer cheer cheer chee chee."

He really took this song seriously long before music was able to do,

long before science was able to do,

because scientists would not take the study of birdsong very seriously until they could record it,

and then print it out and turn it into data to be rigorously analysed.

In fact, the history of the scientific study of birdsong

has shown ever more accurate ways of quantifying it.

Well, originally, birdsong was studied very informally,

very qualitatively, because we didn't have the equipment to record the song nor to analyse it.

Now we can measure frequencies very precisely.

We can measure rhythms very precisely.

We can measure form very precisely.

There are a lot of tools we can use which allow us to quantify,

which is one of the major things about science. If you quantify,

then you can answer scientific questions to a much greater extent

than if you just wave your arms around and don't count things.

One man who knows a thing or two - or three - about counting is Professor Donald Kroodsma.

A wise owl of birdsong science,

there is little he doesn't know about collecting and recording birdsong data.

Kroodsma lives amongst his beloved birds in the forests of Massachusetts.

To capture these songs, I love to use what's called a parabolic microphone.

It's just a precision instrument that takes sounds and directs them

off this parabola back to the microphone.

It's like when you aim that parabola at a bird and put the headphones on,

suddenly you are there.

The bird is right there, singing in your face,

so loud and crisp, and it's magical.

There are about 4,600 species of songbirds.

It's a remarkable number, a remarkably successful group.

Some sing beautiful, varied songs,

some sing the same little phrase again and again.

Almost everything to do with birdsong varies from one species to another.

Oh, one of my favourite birdsongs, I think, is the wood thrush,

to slow down, to really get a feeling for what's going on in these birds,

because it gives you a glimpse of what's going on in those voice boxes,

as the bird is actually singing.

We humans have just one voice box, and it's at the top of our windpipe.

But birds, extraordinarily, can sing a duet with themselves,

because they have two voice boxes -

down at the bottom of the windpipe, it branches off to the two lungs,

and at the top of each branch is an independently controlled voice box.

But when you slow that song down,

you see those two voice boxes at work.

The double voice box certainly impresses the ladies -

yet more evidence for the role of song in attracting females.

It's the female, I'm convinced, who's doing all the listening,

and making decisions,

because you have all these females paired to males,

and they're paired monogamously.

But yet there's so much more going on in these monogamous pairings,

because once you do the DNA fingerprinting of the babies in the nest,

you realise that these females are mating not only with their own social monogamous partner,

but they're also mating with other males in the neighbourhood.

In this clip from The Life Of Birds,

two male sparrows, Alpha and Beta, are vying for the attentions

of one female.

But she has got her eye cocked.

Beta is still in the hedge, calling quietly to her.

She joins him, and now, while Alpha is preoccupied with feeding,

she and Beta get together.

Twirling her tail is an invitation, and in a split second, they mate.

So why do males sing?

Well, I think they sing, and they sing so much more than we would think would be necessary -

they sing because females are always listening.

Donald Kroodsma is one of the best-known field biologists

working on birdsong,

and most of his work is collecting song in the field and analysing it.

I would say that the one thing missing from Don's analysis is

he just hasn't given music that much thought,

and I think if you take music seriously,

you will then take birdsong more seriously.

I'm not sure anybody knows what music is!

It's, er... I suppose as a scientist, I might say,

well, it's any series, any pattern of sounds that strikes us as somewhat pleasing,

but not all human music is pleasing to me,

so I don't know what human music is.

I really don't know what bird music is, or whether birdsong IS music.

David's work has this veneer of rigour, because he talks about scientific work,

and yet to me it's unscientific,

and in that sense it undermines the agenda many of us have, to make the world more scientifically literate.

I'm interested in birdsong as music.

Why do so many birdsongs sound musical to our human ears?

# Una verdad se inventa

# Con suma precision

# Y la labor inmensa

# De la imaginacio-on... #

The song La Verdad, which means The Truth,

well, actually, its lyrics don't have pretty much to do with birds,

but the way I build up the music, it has.

# Yo no quiero desganos

# Ni falta de pasion

# Yo no quiero estar en manos

# De un gran simulado-or

# No-o... #

'I was playing that song outside my house,'

and these birds sang there, like, "Qua-ka-ra-ka....!"

And that was a long, long time ago, and that day,

I said, I want this cascade, like a waterfall of birds.

I started to loop different lengths of music,

so I have a pattern going one loop,

and a different pattern going in another loop.

# Ka-ka, ka-ka-ka-ka-ka... #

SECOND LOOP OF SOUND DEVELOPS WITH SCAT SINGING

Music is everywhere.

We live in an ocean of sound.

I was playing this show in Italy on top of a hill one evening,

and I heard this very cool brand-new part,

then I realised I was singing a duet with this little owl.

And I thought, I could die right now, cos life does not get better than this!

I'm singing a duet with an owl!

JARVIS COCKER: It's kind of like the original Andean music, birdsong, isn't it?

It's like it generates itself.

I mean, I suppose as a listener,

you affect it a little bit, as in if you make too much noise, they'll shut up and fly away.

But if you sit there, and are quiet, then it just happens.

David knows he'll eventually have to face the music with the science world,

but before he does, he's biding his time with a kindred spirit.

HE WHISTLES

In New Jersey, Joe Sodano has been impersonating birds since he was 4.

He combines this hobby with running a business transporting turkeys.

OK, who's going to market? HE GOBBLES AT THEM

Your turn, buddy.

It's your turn, buddy.

It's your turn. Somebody wants to eat you.

So what kind of birds can you imitate?

Oh...

a lot of birds.

I love the cardinal, but this time of year, they're not responding,

cos they're mating. The cardinal - he's a beautiful bird, the cardinal.

He goes, like...

PIERCING WHISTLE

Then we have the northern mockingbird, which I love.

We've got the American robin.

He goes, like, "Hello, Mr Robin!" "Hello!" he says.

Joe's not the only one in his household who can sing.

What's your favourite birdsong?

Birdsong? Um...

.. like...

I love can-can.

HE TWEETS THE CAN-CAN

'Birds sing because they're happy.

'The world is going to be a very, very dark place if the birds aren't singing. '

CAN-CAN CONTINUES WITH BACKING

'My whistle, it'll pierce you sometimes.

'People complain, that have hearing aids, that it kind of does something to their hearing aid.

'I've had a few complaints. '

Humans imitating birds is no rare phenomenon.

Astonishingly, the process can work in reverse.

Good heavens! What's the time?

Who's a pretty boy, then?

Say hello.

'Ello!

SCOTTISH ACCENT: A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.

WOLF WHISTLE

Give us a kiss!

Da-da-da-da-ra!

But perhaps the most extraordinary example of a bird learning human sounds

is that of the superb lyre bird, native of Australia.

It's the daddy of all mimics.

To persuade females to come close and admire his plumes,

he sings the most complex song he can manage,

and he does that by copying the songs of all the other birds he hears around him,

such as the kookaburra.

Even the original is fooled.

He also, in his attempt to outsing his rivals,

incorporates other sounds that he hears in the forest.

That was a camera shutter.

And again.

And now, a camera with a motor drive.

And that's a car alarm.

The sounds of foresters and their chainsaws working nearby.

What the lyre bird is doing is called vocal learning.

This is the ability of an animal

to learn and reproduce a new sound, and it makes them pretty special,

because very few other animals can do it.

David's decided to go to New York

to explore the similarities between bird and human vocal learning.

He's meeting Professor Ofer Tchernichovski,

a man so obsessed with vocal learning

that he's spent a solid 11 years studying the song of just one bird species - the zebra finch.

Ofer and his research team keep 50 breeding pairs of zebra finches

that provide a constant supply of little learners.

In each one of those nest boxes

you can see there are eggs.

Those are eggs that were just laid by the female. Once they hatch,

we are going to separate the father

and take the mother with the chicks to another colony area

for mothers and babies only.

We are doing that

because the female zebra finches, they do not sing.

So those young animals are going to grow up without hearing natural song

until we decide to let them hear it.

Zebra finches are popular with birdsong scientists

because they breed like rabbits. From being an egg to laying an egg

takes just 90 days.

So with four generations in a year, Ofer gets answers about song learning very quickly.

When they're 35 days old, Ofer transfers his baby male finches

to a soundproof box.

Here, he uses models to train his birds to sing.

You see this young male...

and you can see that there is a plastic figure

just there, in front of a speaker.

And you can see two keys right there, on the left and on the right.

Occasionally he is pecking on those keys, and he is doing that

in order to hear song playback that comes from this direction

where we see a figure of a bird.

As soon as this young finch pecks on a button,

it hears the song...

relaxes, and begins to fall asleep.

Every noise the zebra finches make is recorded,

and 10,000 gigabytes of data have been analysed.

Ofer believes he's starting to understand how the zebra finches learn to sing.

Like humans,

he's found they need teachers,

regular practice, and frequent naps.

Also like us, they have a critical period for learning.

They can learn only during a very narrow window of their development.

When they are about 35 days old, they have already started to sing,

very faint songs, called subsongs. At that time,

if they hear a song of an adult male, which they've never heard,

they can actually start imitating it.

If we just wait 30 more days, they cannot do very well.

If we wait another 20 days, they can hardly imitate at all.

And Ofer sees a human connection to his experience with zebra finches.

We are very interested - what is it

in their sensitive period that is so special, which also makes them similar to us?

Human infants can acquire new language and learn it,

and acquire it with no apparent effort and no accent.

You can hear that I have an accent. My daughters don't.

At the beginning of the window of learning,

the birds make random sounds, just like babies do.

You can see that in this very young bird, at about day 35,

he was never trained with anything...

But as they quickly mature, Ofer has discovered that the birds favour specific sounds,

that appear as clusters on the graphs. Not only that,

they also start singing them in a set order, just like a child turning noises into words.

But just because zebra finch and human learning develop along similar lines,

it doesn't mean the birds know what they're doing.

It doesn't mean the birds have consciousness, and it doesn't mean they think their songs beautiful.

So you've listened to these baby male zebra finches,

found all these clusters, you've drawn this graph and all these lines.

Can science address the question of why birdsong sounds beautiful to human ears?

I personally wouldn't like to live in a world where we could really measure beauty.

For me, the fact that I can observe those clusters shown up,

I just observe more beauty.

It doesn't explain the beauty, but I can see it.

In art, people create beauty.

In science, it's less talented people, who can only discover beauty.

The beauty of birdsong has inspired artists and musicians for centuries.

Composers such as Haydn, Ravel and Beethoven

have incorporated the sound into some of their most famous works.

Music is essentially an abstract art form,

but, having said that,

obviously everyday sounds feed into the compositional process

and so I think if you are a composer with an acute ear,

little things will feed in, and you'll play with them,

just as, in a way, one quotes earlier composers.

So you quote the sounds around you.

Beethoven, in the Pastoral Symphony,

is expressing, I think, the serenity of nature,

and he decorates a cadence point in the slow movement

with a little cadenza for three birds.

There's the nightingale, which has this oscillation...

.. which gets gradually faster and turns into a trill,

then there's the cuckoo...

.. and the quail.

It's very fascinating

that as we got into the 20th century in musical history,

so we had a complete shift

in terms of birdsong.

Up until then, on the whole,

composers had imitated, and mainly imitated birds that we recognise -

cuckoos or whatever, or pigeons and things like that, a cooing sound.

With Messiaen, we got a key change.

Olivier Messiaen was one of the most important composers of the 20th century.

His music was harmonically colourful, rhythmically complex,

and in his later work, hugely influenced by birdsong.

However, unlike previous classical composers,

Messiaen actually went into the fields and forests of his native France to listen to

and musically notate birdsong.

His belief was that birds were musical,

but that they were musical because God had put them into creation

to be musicians.

They were the real musicians of... of God's creation, rather than human beings.

Peter Hill studied with Messiaen and has recorded many of his works.

When I studied with Messiaen,

he always confessed, "I'm not a scientist - I write birdsong,

"really, because I love birds, and they enchant me."

He worked them into a whole series of very remarkable pieces.

The most famous, probably, is for piano - Catalogue d'Oiseaux.

One of the most beautiful pieces in Messiaen's Catalogue d'Oiseaux,

which he wrote in the mid-1950s, is Le Traquet Stapazin,

which translates as the Black-Eared Wheatear,

and he's imagining a kind of medley of birds here

in the darkness before dawn on a midsummer morning.

First of all there's the ortolan bunting, a flute-like sound,

Messiaen says, and then the spectacled warbler,

which has a kind of chattering effect,

but always over this harmony of E major...

And then that's interrupted by a harsh sea bird out to sea,

so we know we're by the sea -

it's a herring gull...

And then a great crow...

Then you get the gentler birds...

That's the spectacled warbler again, and then the goldfinch.

In the world that Messiaen creates from birdsong, it is very angular,

and it doesn't fit into our ordinary concept of harmony.

But that's why it's sort of unique, and in a way it's truer to birdsong

than, actually, Beethoven was, or Mozart or Haydn,

because they were trying to fit it in to a pre-existing harmony.

In one way, birdsong is the most perfect music, because it exists in a kind of vacuum of its own.

It's unsullied, it's totally pure.

In another way, it has nothing to do with music as we know it.

But one of the great challenges any artist faces

is to bring these things together -

to bring the sounds of nature

into the constructs that we call Western music.

Rising to that challenge,

two modern-day Messiaens have come together at Peter Gabriel's Real World Studios in Wiltshire

to work on a unique composition.

They are musician Richard Evans and producer Simon Emmerson,

who, as well as leading the Afro-Celt Sound System,

is also an obsessive birdwatcher.

David has sent Simon and Richard a selection of bird sounds

around which they'll create a brand-new piece of music.

We started by building up the rhythm track

and the obvious place was at the bottom end,

a place where a bass drum or a bass beat would fall,

so we put a bittern on beat one...

LOW BOOM

.. which is this marshland bird that skulks around

in the fringes of the reeds.

OK. We then wanted a back beat,

um, and a stonechat has a sound

of a stone being hit together,

so we bring in the stonechat...

.. so you've got a basic groove, one two.

We put a woodpecker in now, just to act as a kind of woodblock.

That's the woodpecker,

um, tapping away... on a tree.

It's not doing the drumming.

Here comes the hoopoe.

So there's your basic rhythm track.

We can mix and vary these.

So we needed, like, a lead vocal.

The, er, most...

appealingly vocal we've got, I think, is the eider duck,

which sounds a little bit like Frankie Howerd, the English comedian,

guesting on Carry On Birdwatching.

Oo-ooh!

Oo-ooh!

Oo-ooh!

Oo-ooh!

And that is eider duck, it's not Frankie Howerd.

And finally,

um...

OK, let's just stop all that.

The day before, Peter Gabriel recorded some vocals,

based on the song of the butcher bird,

so-called for impaling its victims on thorns before devouring them.

Peter Gabriel came to my studio at home

and he tried to sing as closely as he possibly could

to, um, the butcher bird song.

So what we'd do was take each phrase and loop it up,

so the butcher bird would be heard 12 times, and he'd just sing and sing and sing

until he'd learnt the little melody

and got as close as possibly he could to the exact melody.

And then we'd edit together something that was exactly the same. So from this...

.. we ended up with him...

What Peter really wanted

was us to put a process on it where, rather than him just singing along

exactly with the bird, he wants it to sound

as if his voice is slowly morphing and changing into the sound of the butcher bird and back again.

We haven't done that yet. That's tomorrow's job,

and it will be fairly difficult, I think, to achieve that.

David will add his own contribution to the bird composition in a few days' time.

But in the meantime, in Germany, his moment of truth has arrived.

All year, David's ideas on birdsong and its musical qualities

have been ruffling the feathers of the world's leading avian scientists.

Now, they've flocked to Berlin for a conference.

There's one big question that I hope to talk to some of these scientists about.

Very few scientists have taken seriously the question of what birds are singing.

Why do so many birds sing elaborate, very beautiful, musically constructed songs,

when what they're trying to do with these songs is something rather simple -

attract mates, defend territories?

They'd be a lot better off using some simple, clear song.

It's the last day of the conference and in Berlin's botanical gardens,

it's high noon for David.

Three of the world's leading avian scientists have reluctantly agreed to meet him. Between them,

they have 97 years' experience studying birdsong.

Do you think that a musician has any role to help understand birdsong?

Or are we just too human-centred and misguided to be of any use?

Well?

What do you think? I think a musician can help to describe the beauty of birdsong -

describe birdsong in an artistic sense.

I mean, scientists haven't got a complete stranglehold on birdsong,

but if you want to understand birdsong from a scientific point of view,

you've got to approach it from a scientific point of view,

and I personally don't really think that people from the arts

can help us to any great degree in that endeavour. Well said.

I would not tell an artist how he should listen to birdsong,

and I think in that same way, it bothers a little

to have an artist, a musician, telling us, "Oh, you should be listening in this way."

But David really isn't telling us how to listen - he's just making some unscientific declarations

that insult my birds and indirectly, you know, that bothers me.

Birds sing because they have to - they must, this is what it means to be a bird.

That's a completely tautological argument, isn't it? Not entirely.

"They must"?! That's no scientific explanation. is the same in all these cases,

but the songs are very diverse, different and interesting in themselves.

It has...

All behaviour patterns have to work. Yeah. Song has to work.

But music is a totally human conception.

I don't understand why you want to impose this word on something wonderful like birdsong.

Because it helps... You then focus on the song itself.

Science focuses on the function of the song too often,

and not on the song in itself.

I think you're being anthropomorphic. I don't understand why you want to use the word music.

Assuming that birds are like people,

in any sort of sense, is a very dangerous thing to do.

From the evolutionary point of view, our nearest common ancestor was some reptile crawling around in sludge!

You're not likely to find anything in common as far as vocal communication is concerned.

But I also think it's anthropomorphic to count all the parts of the song

and really be so quantifying about it, and stop there.

If you really want to do science, you have to count, you have to do things that are quantitative,

and set up experiments and hypotheses... Why not count...?

Speculating on the basis of one or two animals is not interesting.

Why not count the rhythms, the shape, the form -

not just the number of differences? That's just the beginning.

Scientists don't like it when non-scientists criticise them.

They say, "How dare you? We're not musicians, we're not going to criticise music.

"You should leave us scientists alone. We have enough problems! This work's hard enough to do as it is,

"and you're making it more difficult."

I think this is thoroughly wacky. Wacky? Thoroughly.

Do you think most birds would imitate or respond to human beings who would whistle to them?

If you say the birds are responding to music as a special sound, special human sound,

as a scientist I step back and say, "Wait a minute."

You're saying they respond to a special kind of sound,

but do you have a control sound?

When we wanted to get birds to sing in the laboratory, we'd try music,

we'd try everything. What worked was a vacuum cleaner. Turn the vacuum cleaner on, they sang.

David is a philosopher and he's a musician.

So he's looking at birdsong from a very different angle to your average scientist.

And he has, to my mind, ignored quite a large body of evidence,

gleaned scientifically,

by people setting up hypotheses and testing them and being sure they had good sample sizes,

and doing all the things us scientists have to do.

We're very cautious people, scientists. I think he finds that very frustrating.

Science doesn't have, you know, the upper hand in figuring out what birdsong is about.

They have one approach. It picks up on some things, misses out others.

In a sense, it's science and arts - a different approach, different angles.

He's an interesting man. He's got very interesting ideas.

But he's not a scientist.

What would it take for me to become a scientist? Complete retraining.

Science is the art of collecting interesting numbers,

and so I would ask you to collect some numbers,

analyse them, and tell us what that tells you about the world.

David has failed to convince the scientists

that his ideas are worth taking seriously,

and the wall between their world and his is as high as ever.

# Loving you

# Is easy cos you're beautiful

# Making love with you

# Is all I wanna do

# La-la-la-la-la

# La-la-la-la-la

# La-la-la-la-la... #

Feeling rejected, he's retreated back to the welcoming embrace of art - a world free of numbers,

but rich in imagination.

He's agreed to take part in the ultimate experiment in anthropomorphism.

He's going to become a song thrush in an art installation.

The work is to be created by conceptual artist Marcus Coates.

Coates has dedicated most of his video and performance installations

to exploring the relationships between humans and animals.

Now, in his most ambitious work to date,

he's creating a video dawn chorus, sung by humans.

David is to be the final bird in his collection.

I developed this technique,

probably about seven years aho,

of recreating birdsong, but using human voices.

This is a re-enactment of a dawn chorus,

where each bird will be sung by a different singer.

David today will be singing like a song thrush.

So I'm not like waking up under covers?

No, I think you're just hanging out in this dark space.

We've got some fantastic recordings,

and we slowed down the birdsong.

Double-sided...

'They have a little ear piece and they sing along with it, and I film them singing this,

'and we speed the film up to the original bird speed,

'and what you in effect get is an extremely accurate rendition of birdsong. '

'We're also using human habitats, and David has said that he spends a lot of time in hotels,

'and it's a kind of habitual place for him. David's sitting here,

'in his underpants -

'he's in a very human environment. '

All right, let's run.

Starting to play... now.

Oh! Oh! Oh-oh-oh...!

'This project is more about, rather than us projecting our emotions

'and our kind of needs onto birds,

'it's kind of the other way round, and we are becoming birds.

'And there is that element in all of us

'that wants to believe that birds enjoy singing,

'and they're singing because they're in love, or they're joyous,

'or they're just singing because they're pleased to be alive. '

'It wasn't just the song that became very accurate when we sped it up.

'Also, the people's movements and their mannerisms -

'it's almost as if, if you sped humans up ten times,

'they'd become much more like birds. '

David's experience of being a bird and his brush-off from the science world has drawn him back

to what ignited his passion in the first place - duetting with living birds.

At the Bronx Zoo in New York,

he's recruited another artist inspired by birdsong.

Like David, musician Michael Pestel has a bit of previous,

duetting with birds.

On this occasion, Pestel has brought along his pride and joy -

the Bird Machine.

The Bird Machine is an evolving project.

It's never really finished.

In fact, each time I play it, it's slightly different.

The core of this instrument is a recorder - a bass recorder in C -

which is designed according to the square design of organ pipes -

Renaissance organ pipes.

BURBLING MUSIC WITH WHISTLES

Other sounds are, you know, your generic seagull...

SQUAWKING

.. European blackbird...

Then you've got the wind wand.

Well, of course, it's always a bit of a hit or miss when you go into aviaries.

One tries to draw them out,

and in the process, draw oneself out.

The response is intuitive, and that's enough for me.

I'm certainly not approaching this as a scientist.

When there is a dialogue, it's an intensely satisfying one.

Despite the best efforts of Michael, David and the Bird Machine,

they've all failed to get a response.

However, in another part of the zoo, David has left the best for himself -

the white-crested laughing thrush,

the bird that inspired him in Pittsburgh four years ago.

Both the male and female of this species duet together.

They are the Sonny and Cher of the bird world,

hopping around the forest floor, impressing each other with their vocal gymnastics.

David is hoping they're up for a threesome.

Unlike most birds, in this species, the males and females sing together.

They do not use their song primarily to defend territories or attract mates,

but the males and females together use song to establish

connection between each other in the forest - to sort of collectively

define a pair bond between the two of them.

So if a clarinet interjects into the mix, it's not seen as a threat

or a challenge, or something like that. It's more like, "Oh, another sound to riff off of."

I think it's very easy to get birds to react to human noises.

I can make woodpeckers drum by clicking my tongue.

If you whistle at a bird at the right frequency,

it's going to reply, because it's a frequency its own species uses.

And I think many birds are rhythmical in the sounds they produce.

Many birds produce very pure tones,

which is why David would want to call them musical.

And then he can then imitate those sounds, to some extent,

with his musical instruments,

and the net result is you start getting a duet between him and the bird.

# Why do birds

# Suddenly appear

# Every time you are near...? #

So perhaps David has simply been conducting an exercise in call and response.

Without convincing evidence, the scientists will never take him seriously.

But while he's been travelling the world,

a scientific paper has been published

that might actually support his belief in a pleasure principle for birdsong.

On the 30th August 2006,

Professor Erich Jarvis of Duke University, North Carolina,

published a paper in the Journal of Neuroscience.

It revealed important chemical changes taking place in the brains of zebra finches.

Jarvis had actually found evidence

that dopamine, the so-called pleasure molecule,

is released when they sing.

We know that in the mammalian brain, in our own brain as well,

there's a molecule called dopamine that is released

into certain areas of the brain during pleasurable experiences -

during dancing, singing, even sex and so forth, or eating good food.

And that causes addiction to these things.

And what we discovered is that when birds sing,

that causes dopamine release into these similar brain areas.

There are seven brain areas in birds

that appear to be important for vocal learning and production.

It was in one of these, area X,

that Erich and his team recorded a rise in the level of dopamine

when his zebra finches sang.

They seemed to be enjoying all their singing, but particularly when directed to females.

You've discovered a molecule that proves this?

We've discovered... No, I'm not going to say proves it... Suggests, exactly.

Dopamine has been proposed to be involved in a number of functions,

including learning, timing of a brain system, and so forth.

One of the hypotheses out there, and it's a strong one,

is that it's involved in reinforcing systems and reinforcing feelings.

And particularly pleasurable feelings.

And has this been studied in other animals? Yeah.

It's already been found...?Yeah, so actually the brain system in the animal studied the most, rats,

where it's for drug addiction, it's most known that you give rats cocaine,

you get these huge dopamine releases

that then makes them become addicted to the cocaine.

That's how we've thought we become addicted to cocaine. So you generate more pleasure from the drug,

and so this could be just the birds' natural way of doing it.

So you think birds might be addicted to singing?

Yeah, that's right. That's a possibility. Could be a more healthy addiction! That's right.

Does that mean birds sing for the same reasons humans sing?

Um... if you ask that question

to a bunch of different biologists, you'll get different answers.

And so I can only give you my answer,

which is I do think that birds sing,

in part, for a similar reason why humans sing - for pleasure.

# Ah-aa-aa-aah... #

David at last found an acknowledgement from the science world, that birds might,

perhaps, given the right conditions and the presence of a female bird,

possibly sing because... yes, they enjoy it.

# Aah-aa-aa-aah... #

In the end, this is always going to be a standoff.

But even if David's idea will never take wing in the lecture hall,

it has come home to roost in the recording studio.

Now at the end of his journey, he is to join up with Simon and Richard

at Real World Studios,

to add his contribution to their human-bird composition.

The birds have played their part, in the form of the rhythm track.

Now David is to provide the first human element, playing his bass clarinet,

along with Kate St John on cor anglais.

MUSIC STARTS

That was cool!

And finally, Simon has recruited the band Guillemots to play on the track.

It's one of the most natural forms of music you could imagine,

and I've always been... I've played music since I can remember,

but because I've got a musical ear,

I always find it fairly easy to identify birdsongs,

so from quite early on, I've been listening out

to different birdsongs.

Now, at this point, we can go off into you guys. Yeah.

At the moment, it goes to quite a formal reel...

'Absolutely no idea what they're gonna do.

'What you're seeing today is very much kind of edge-of-the-seat stuff.

'We haven't had any rehearsals. We're just seeing what happens. '

Is that the corncrake there? Yeah, the corncrake...

I really believe

birdsong IS music, and that conclusion has been reinforced

and pushed a little further by meeting all these interesting people and working with them,

and I think making music this way hopefully makes one less selfish,

and a better listener.

I'm responding to the environment,

really interacting with the world around.

All right, I'm ready.

OK. Here we go.

Good luck, studio.

Subtitles by Judith Russell Red Bee Media Ltd 2007

E-mail subtitling@bbc.co.uk