October Interspecies.com newsletter

Interspecies has always had a strong element of roadshow about it. While the best-known aspect of our work gets accomplished in solitude out on the water with freeswimming cetaceans, the rest occurs at high-profile conferences, festivals, shows, radio and TV, where I speak and perform, design and perform interactive media that guides people toward perceptions of habitat and animals based on relationship and responsibility.

Over the years the venues for these performances have gotten ever more prestigious, suggesting that all this hard work is having some effect. Events in the past three years have included two National Geographic films, an evening multimedia perfomance about whale language at The European Cetacean Society's Canary Island Conference (one of the two largest whale science gatherings in the world), CBS news Sixty Minutes, an underwater concert at the Berlin Liquidrom for the International Whaling Commission (with the audience floating in a pool), and Interspecies' recent month-long audio event at Japan EXPO, that allowed children to compose music from underwater animal sounds.

Interspecies is now focusing its very limited resources to energize this outreach program, by sponsoring a trio of creative musicians to first design and then perform original shows that speak directly, through form and content, to the subject of the specific event. This trio of performance artists played its fourth show just a few days ago, on October 1, 2005, as a special evening event for the 1100 delegates of the 8th World Wilderness Congress in Anchorage Alaska. The songs, sounds, readings, films, imagery, all focused on the human relationship to wilderness. If anyone reading this newsletter, is involved in an event, and would like more info about adding the Interspecies performance group to their program, contact us.

This month, a scientific paper was published explaining that Australian zebra finches rehearse songs in their sleep. The songs they sing each night, they learned during the course of the previous day. And while rehearsing these songs in their sleep, they duplicate subtle versions of the movements they made while inventing the songs. As the researcher concludes, "the songbird dreams of singing."

Male and female plain-tailed wrens from Ecuador sing at least 20 gender-based melodies, structured as verse or chorus. All the melodies are tuned chromatically. The researcher's own comments about his discovery also offer a glimpse of the intellectual openness practiced for more than a century by bird scientists. "Plain-tailed wren choruses may be the most highly coordinated and complex group vocalisations sung by any animal. As to whether they are more complex than human group vocalizations, I expect that the degree of coordination within plain-tailed wren choruses would be the envy of any choral conductor or orchestra leader." Click on the name above to hear the birds for yourself.

This online newsletter will continue to report the best of bird research, for two reasons that strike at the heart of our work with artists and nature. Of all animal research, recent bird studies not only provide a profound understanding into bird culture, but they are also re-making the human definition of what, precisely, is an animal. This research elucidates a clear linkage between bird songs and human music. Since human music is grounded in the philosophy of aesthetics, is it possible to study bird song and not conclude that birds must also have a sense of aesthetics?

It seems noteworthy that bird researchers are making these discoveries that extend our human perception of animal consciousness and culture, and not primate researchers or whale researchers. Cetacean researchers, in particular, seem illogically close-minded about acknowledging language and intellectual culture as fit subjects for study. The reason is embedded in the culture of the research itself. If the research community started representing the orca, for instance, as a sentient being possessed of a sense of right and wrong, one can easily imagine that the researchers themselves would be forced to redefine the ethics of their own study methods, which are sometimes deplorable. Imagine how it would alter the current discussion about whaling.

Along the east coast of Vancouver Island, mainstream researchers and whale watching skippers go out of their way to ban any person transmitting quiet music or voice into the water in an attempt to communicate with — essentially to meet halfway — the local orcas. Yet many of these same scientists zoom around the water in noisy motorboats which make far more noise for far longer periods of time. The whalewatching community is worse. They make the most noise of all, and for months on end. The overt censorship against musicians and seekers (scientists and non-scientists alike) derives from intention. Making a lot of noise to gather a data set about fin coloration or to make money from tourism is actively encouraged, and often subsidized by tax dollars. But making music to elaborate a new interactive relationship with orcas, is forbidden within the current paradigm. Those who choose to interact are chastened as hacks or mystics. While most of the censors would deny that encouraging interaction is dangerous to their very subjective worldview, the closemindedness clearly succeeds in keeping a dated worldview intact.

Let's take it a step further. We at Interspecies have long believed that there are many species of animals possessing a well-developed consciousness, communication capability, and, yes, sense of aesthetics. Aesthetics suggests a sense of beauty. Beauty is defined as making choices and showing preferences about media — which includes movement, sounds, and interactions.

We at Interspecies are ethological futurists. If, indeed, the birds demonstrate a clear sense of aesthetics, then you can bet the bank that other species demonstrate it as well, although the media they use to express it is less explicit to the agenda-laden community that governs the research. Times are changing. In the next five years, expect to hear more about whales, dolphins, wolves possessing language, deep culture, and a sense of aesthetics. And thank the bird scientists for leading the way.

Let's take it another step further. Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy. If birds, whales, chimps, and wolves (why stop there...how about octopus, slime mold, so on) demonstrate a sense of aesthetics, then perhaps they utilize other aspects of human civilization as well: ethics, epistomology, law, a sense of the sacred. Start looking for these claims to show up in the bird literature within the next five years. Primate and Cetacean journals won't show anything for at least 10 more years.

Or read about it right now, in hundreds of books of Native beliefs. For instance, there is a belief among native people in Alaska that the animal we observe in nature is dressed in a disguise he or she puts on to visit our world. Once home again, the animal removes its fur, its scales, its feathers, and shows its true form which is identical to a human’s true form. One last prediction. Only when the scientific community accepts interspecies communication as a valid research technique, will any animal ever invite a scientist into its home.

Leafy Sea Dragon is a computer software system designed to facilitate communication with whales and dolphins. It is the work of Serge Maase, a Java programmer living in Montreal.

Think of Serge's Java program as instant messaging software for dolphins and humans. It does not translate whistles, but rather, attempts to recognize them, thus allowing the human user to assign names to individual whistles. It also automatically assigns identifiers to unrecognized whistles, through a process of noting similarities and differences with other sounds. Through such a process, the software greatly enhances a researcher's ability to identify and categorize the structure of cetacean communication. It is up to the user to figure out their meaning.

Leafy Sea Dragon not only analyses, but can also be configured to emit whistles underwater. Once it whistles, it follows up by assigning text names to any whistles emitted by cetaceans in response to these self-generated whistles.

Serge regards the current version of Leafy Sea Dragon to be a Beta, or early phase in the software's development. Nonethless, it is robust enough to be used right now by adventurous communication scientists and whale watchers with a technical bent. Technical support is provided by Serge himself.

How might Leafy be developed? Just for one example, it has been suggested as a communication tool for treating medical issues of captive dolphins, facilitating an artificial vocabulary of whistles that describe ailments, symptoms, body parts, etc.

4 Links for October

The A Capella News is a blog and networking forum that provides info, links, and audio sources for all music based on the unaccompanied human voice.
The giant squid has finally been photographed alive, although we were sad to learn that the ten-armed volunteer who showed him/her self lost a tentacle in the process. This is a good description of the event from the Washington Post.
Mark Fischer's pioneering wavelet images of mostly whale communication, have long been featured on Interspecies.com. Mark has recently placed, online, various wavelet movies. If you have a broadband connection, check them out at this site.
The writing, above, about bird song, makes one realize that human beings did not invent harmony or rhythm. Nor did we even invent the musical scales that display frequencies as a relationship best described by mathematics. Check out this article, entitled Music May Predate Humans. And question the use of the overly cautious verb, may.

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