Understanding the Songbird: Some Aspects of Pattern in Musical Composition and Perception

Proceedings [International Seminar on ‘Creating & Teaching Music Patterns’]

Department of Instrumental Music, Rabindra Bharati University | 16-18 December, 2013

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Understanding the Songbird: Some Aspects of Pattern in Musical Composition and Perception

Marc Duby, Professor in Music, University of South Africa (UNISA) [South Africa]

In this article I consider how various aspects of pattern play out in various genres of western art music, both within the common practice period and thereafter. In this discussion I adopt a mostly ecological stance, understood as considering the organism’s relationship with the environment as a point of departure. The argument contains two interludes, where I discuss Messiaen’s incorporation of birdsong in his music followed by an exploration of the nature of birdsong itself and what this may imply for understanding music as a uniquely human phenomenon.

Some western art music composers play with the mathematical properties of music by constructing musical riddles, with Bach’s Musical Offering a case in point.In the early twentieth century, serialist composers made use of inversion, retrograde and other transformations of tone row patterns. Bartók, Debussy, Messiaen drew on specificscales and modes as source material to create music with a characteristic flavour.Brian Boyd argues that perceiving patterns plays a vital role in how organisms relate to their environment, while Eric Clarke invokes the concept of the invariant (a core musical pattern) to advance an ecological understanding of music.

I analyse some examples of tonal music from the common practice period in western art music as well as some examples from Steve Reich in the later twentieth century, which share a common foundation in tonality but exhibit very different musical characteristics. I argue that the sense of pattern is not immanent in musical notation but grounded rather in human perception of patterned material.Maurice Merleau-Ponty (:150) suggests that ‘The musical meaning of a sonata is inseparable from the sounds which are its vehicle,’ so foregrounding the world of sound in the first-person experience of music perception.

A phenomenological interpretation aims to describe this human experience of music, with Thomas Clifton’s Music as Heard a classic of the literature. With respect to melodic, timbral or rhythmic patterns, Anthony Storr insists onthe inherent human need for pattern-recognition. His insights are being borne out by current research in neuroscience. Implicit in Storr’s argument is music understood as a pre-eminently social phenomenon, in many respects uniquely human.The question arises: does the songbird herself understand her song as ‘musical’?

Keywords: aesthetics, Bach, birdsong, categories, figure, fugue, Gestalt, melody, Messiaen, pattern, protomusicality

1. Some aspects of pattern in common practice western art music

I begin by examining some stylistic aspects inwestern art music to demonstrate two very different approaches to pattern-based composition, firstin relation to the common practice1 period followed

1 ‘The common practice period, in the history of Western art music (broadly called classical music), spanning

the Baroque, Classical, and Romantic periods, lasted from about 1600 until about 1900.’ cnmat.berkeley.edu/category/subjects/common_practice_music_theory‎, accessed 15 August 2013.

International Seminar on ‘Creating & Teaching Music Patterns’ Proceedings


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by an example of 'phase music' (also known as minimalism) from the second half of the 20th century.

Pal and Majunder define pattern follows:

[A] pattern is any distinguishable interrelation of data (analogue or digital), events and/or concepts. The shape of a face, a table, the order of musical notes and a piece of music, the theme of a poem or a symphony, the tracks made on photographic plates by particles, are all different types of patterns. Thus the recognition of a face, a painting, a printed word, a handwritten word, a military target, the diagnosis of a disease from symptoms, are all pattern recognition problems. (1986: 3)

Considering that these writers are approaching the complexities of pattern recognition from an information science standpoint and are therefore concerned with devising algorithms for ‘automatic machine recognition of patterns’, it follows that they have little to say about how the psychology of how human beings and other organisms deal with patterns. Nonetheless, their list of applications spans a vast catalogue of what they term ‘distinguishable interrelation*s+ of data’ and indicates the wide range of possible contexts in which patterns contribute to human understanding of vital environmental features. I will return to this point regarding patterns and the environment in due course.

Fig. 1: P-cognitive spirals: ‘Each spiral represents a cognitive cycle. The arrow at the top of each spiral indicates the prompting of some pattern, contingent on the immediate context, the experience of this individual, and the priming/inhibiting effects of recently prompted patterns. Only a small fraction of these prompted patterns could be expected to come to conscious attention.’ (Margolis 1987: 2)

Margolis’ concept of pattern-cognitive spirals is one model for understanding the centrality of patterns and how humans interact with them. As he points out(1987:3), he is not alone in considering ‘the tuning of patterns of response to patterns of experience not just an aspect of cognition but the central notion.’ Margolis is among the first wave of writersin the cognitive revolution of the late 20th century, including George Lakoff and others whose research, together with technical developments in brain imagery scanning from neuroscience, has contributed to an entirely new picture of cognition. In the broadest terms, this revolution is characterised by a rejection of a propositional view of knowledge based on various understandings (be they pragmatic, semiotic, or phenomenological) of embodied cognition.



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Brian Boyd emphasises the universal biological necessity underpinning pattern recognition in saying (2009: 43):

Computers still fare dismally at pattern recognition, but because predicting what may come next can make life-or-death differences to living things, organisms—even unicellular animals, even bacteria and plants—have evolved to be pattern extractors, and at least the more intelligent animals, like higher primates and corvids, decidedly prefer regular, symmetrical, or rhythmic patterns.

A clear implication of this line of argument is that all organisms relate to patterns for reasons of survival, a parsimonious heuristic2 capability enabling them to make judgements on the fly that do not depend on intellectual reasoning but rather on what Margolis defines as ‘pure intuition (grasping the thing as a whole).’ In a situation of danger in the wild, it makes evolutionary sense to be able to draw on a lightning-quick intuitive grasp of the distinction between a harmless and a venomous snake.

While western art music forms a starting point to illustrate some aspects of pattern that composers in this field seem to have found fascinating, this is not todenythe culturally situated nature of such patterns by claiming that they are universal.In the historical moment of common practice,combinations of invariant patterns within the sub-genres of canon andfugue,as well as theme and variations,present melodic patternsto the listener meaningfullybecause they spring from a particular historical idiom with implicit historically grounded rules of procedure. Examining the fugues of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, for argument’s sake, the listener is able to follow lines of development because of the identifiable character of the invariants (defined in the following section) Bach uses, as well as the conventions of tension and resolution that underpin the harmonic language of the period in question.

2. Invariants, the ecological approach, and Gestalt perception

Eric Clarke’s ecological approach to understanding musical perception depends on the notion of ‘invariance,’ defined as the idea that ‘within the continuous changes to which the perceiver is exposed there are also invariant properties. As the ecological approach emphasizes, these invariant properties are those of the stimulus information itself — not a representational projection by the perceiver. They are relationships between stimulus properties that remain unchanged despite transformations of the stimulus array as a whole.’ (2005: 34, emphasis added)

2 Adjective: enabling a person to discover or learn something for themselves: a ‘hands-on’ or interactive heuristic approach to learning. Computing: proceeding to a solution by trial and error or by rules that are only loosely defined. http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/heuristic, accessed 15 August 2013.

http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/heuristic



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If we understand Clarke’s ‘relationships between stimulus properties’ as enabling conditions for pattern recognition in music, invariants are the cornerstone on which these relationships are based, emanating both from the composer’s handling of the thematic potentialities of invariants and the listener’s sense-making abilities:

Music offers a particularly clear example of invariance in the perceived identity of material under transposition and other kinds of transformation. A theme or motif in music can be regarded as an invariant (a pattern of temporal proportions and pitch intervals) that is left intact, and hence retains its identity, under transformations such as pitch transposition or changes in global tempo. (2005: 35)

Following Clarke, my argument turns on the understanding that these invariant patterns are framed by the underlying scalar and harmonicpossibilities (‘the rules of the game’) available to the composer. For instance, in common practice it is expected that the dominant seventh chord will resolve in certain more or less predictable ways. This might be considered as one of the axioms or defining characteristics of this particular tonal idiom, whose rules were called into question by the challenge from serialism in the early years of the twentieth century.

The sense that Schoenberg exemplifies a crisis in music that results from a disintegration of a shared ‘language’ of tonality, the seeds of which are sown in the deconstruction of forms in Romantic music from Schubert to Mahler, is undeniable, as is the fact that the development of this music is connected to the social and political crises of modern Western history. (Bowie 2004: 255)

In serialism, Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern sought to invent a new system based on specific mathematical operations (inversion, retrograde, and retrograde inversion) of musical invariants called tone rows, which consisted of all twelve notes of the chromatic scale arranged in a particular order by the composer. The outcome of these procedures is a kind of music that sounds very different from that of the common practice period, in which the focus of interest for the listener is the way in which the composer demonstrates creativity and imagination in transforming the material. Melodic invariant components, whether themes, subjects, or motifs tend to behave according to axiomatic laws of tension and resolution in this harmonic idiom,in which the drive toward resolution provides the teleological impulse.

The point that I wish to make here that with a clearly identifiable subject it is possible for a listener from a particular cultural background and with a degree of expert knowledge to follow and understand the melodic transformations through time to their logical — or musical — conclusion without necessarily looking at a score.In these instances, the musical transformations are audibly apparent. For Lawrence Zbikowski (2006: 117), the listener is able to follow the transformations and so make these connections because of two fundamental aspects of herability to make sense of music, namely ‘the comprehension of a series of temporally successive events, and the ability to draw connections between such events on the basis of shared features.’ Zbikowski suggests that both these abilities are grounded in human categorisation, considered as ‘a cognitive process so basic and so pervasive that it can easily escape our notice.’ (2006: 116)



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However there are instances where such transformations are more visible than necessarily audible. The riddle canons concealed within J S Bach’s Art of Fugue and Musical Offering provide examples where the transformations are concealed in the score, so that the ingenuityis revealedonly by deciphering the notation itself. Steve Reich makes a similar point regarding John Cage’s work allowing random elements to determine the course of the composition:

The process of using the I Ching or imperfections in a sheet of paper to determine musical parameters can’t be heard when listening to music composed that way. The compositional process and the sounding music have no audible connections. Similarly in serial music the series itself is seldom audible. (Steve Reich, notes to Drumming, Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ, Six Pianos Deutsche Grammophon 2740 106)

With regard to riddle canons and other musical puzzles, the ambiguities in hidden patternsdepend onvisual rather than auditory modalities, as in the famous ‘duck-rabbit’ puzzle in Wittgenstein3.Another famous illusion is illustrated in figure 2, as devised by the psychologist Franz Karl Müller-Lyer (1857-1916).The illusion hinges on the possibility of interpreting the two lines as unequal lengths, when in fact they are the same length; the perceiver may be distracted by the orientation of the arrowheads. Adrienne Dengerink Chaplin (2005: 167) shows how Merleau-Ponty understood this aspect of Gestalt theory as illustrating normal perception: ‘Merleau-Ponty’s point is to show that these “mistakes” are not perceptual anomalies but disclosures of the way perception normally works.’

Fig. 2: Müller-Lyer optical illusion (1889)

While space does not allow for an exhaustive discussion of Gestalt theory, there are two elements that merit consideration in discussing music perception. First, Ungerer & Schmid (2006: 36) describe gestalt (holistic) perception as a two-stage process with‘the perception of the object as a whole as the first step...and a kind of decomposition of the perceived whole into individual properties or attributes as a second (optional) step.’The implications of this decomposing process for musical analysis are atomic categories of pitch, timbre, rhythm, and other elements abstracted after the fact from the original experience.

3 In Part 11 of Philosophical Investigations one of Wittgenstein’s themes is aspect seeing. His best known example is of the duck-rabbit – a puzzle picture that can be seen either as a duck looking to the left, or as a rabbit looking upwards and to the right. The sudden awareness of the previously unseen animal in the picture is an example of what Wittgenstein calls ‘the dawning of an aspect.’ This example emphasises the degree to which seeing is linked with expectation and concepts and is far from the passive reception of incoming visual data that some early empiricists believed it to be. http://virtualphilosopher.com/2006/09/wittgenstein_as.html

http://virtualphilosopher.com/2006/09/wittgenstein_as.html



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The second salient element of Gestalt theory for the purposes of this discussion is the figure-ground relationship, in which, according to Merleau-Ponty, ‘we can only perceive things as figures against a ground and in relation to other figures.’ (Chaplin, ibid) Although Merleau-Ponty is referring to visual perception, this Gestalt conceptpoints to the perceived intimate relationship between melodic and harmonic aspects of music, especially in the common practice period. Before analysis abstracts these musical properties, I would argue, the listenermay well perceive melodyperspectivally as the figure and harmony as the ground. This perspectival understanding may need to be reviewed on subsequent reflection, or it may happen almost simultaneously as sonic data are transformed in the act of perception itself.

Gestalt perception may be useful in characterising two levels of experience: raw sonic data at the visceral level and the next stage of organising and categorising the material into relationships in time and space. Walter Hopp places the emphasis on the categorical nature of perception in suggesting (2011: 41): ‘The world we experience presents itself as categorially structured, complex, and significant. It consists not merely, or even principally, of colored points, sounds, and odors, and still less is it a blob of undifferentiated sense-stuff. It is a world of kinds, relations, properties, events, processes, states of affairs, and substances.’

3. Patterns and techniques in minimalism

‘Without musicians, time would be much less understood.’ Messiaen, Conference de Bruxelles (1960: 11) (Pople 1998: 13)

As an example of minimalism, also known as ‘phase music,’ Steve Reich’s 1970-1971 piece DRUMMING isbased on repeated patterns which are modified by phase techniques such as rhythmic displacement (different instruments starting patterns a beat or more after the initial pattern), progressively substituting rests for notes and vice versa, and timbral changes through doubling percussive phrases with human voices (Reich 1974).

What I'm interested in is a compositional process and sounding music that are one and the same thing. I don't know any secrets of structure that you can't hear. We all listen to the process together since it's quite audible, and one of the reasons it's quite audible is because it's happening extremely gradually.(Reich 1974: 10)

Reich constructs a piece lasting approximately ninety minutes out of a single rhythmic pattern (see fig. 3). Reich’s techniques of transformation play out at a very slow rate of change within a clearly tonal soundscape, so drawing on the resources (or limitations, if you prefer) of this idiom but the piece lacks any sense of the teleological impulse because of the modality Reich uses and the absence of melodic development. The patterns are repeated, and then superimposed over one another so as to obscure figure-ground relationships:



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Fig. 3: DRUMMING rhythmic pattern: ‘This pattern undergoes changes of phase position, pitch and timbre, but all the performers play this pattern, or some part of it, throughout the entire piece.’ (Reich 1974: 9)

Reich's work on the piece began shortly after his return from a brief field trip to Ghana where he studied with a master drummer. Reich describes African drum music:

The beauty of the music lies in the way all the lines interlock, meshing and unmeshing, now running counter to each other,now joining together. Close concentration by the listener canproduce a feeling of displacement, a little like the effect youexperience when sitting in one train while another train beginsto pull out of the station. For a moment you are suspended ina relativity limbo, uncertain as to whether it is you, the othertrain, or the station itself that is moving.

There are clear parallels to the effect of minimalist music on the listener. Reich’s procedures and intent in DRUMMING are radically different from those of music of the common practice period. While this piece shares this period’s tonal vocabulary, the sense of development (telos) from the perception of a theme being transformed is lacking, if not totally absent, precisely because the patterns of minimalism, while couched in the tonal language of Western music, do not follow the same rules as symphonic themes or fugue subjects.

4. Understanding the songbird: Messiaen, birdsong, and protomusicality

Clarinet solo. The abyss is Time, with its sorrows and its weariness. The birds are the opposite of Time; they are our desire for light, for stars, for rainbows, for joyful songs!

(Messiaen, in Pople 1998: 40)

Messaien’s music exhibits the use of a highly individual and idiosyncratic musical language, based on several organising principles: 1) modes of limited transposition(see Appendix 1) 2) non-additive rhythms 3) early multi-serialism and 4) birdsong integrated in a thoroughly rule-based way, but nonetheless highly expressive. Drawing inspiration from the sound-phenomena of the world around us, he thoroughly integrated the patterns of birdsong into his compositions from 1953 to the mid-1960s.Messiaen’s approach to birdsong is invested with deep spiritual resonance, as the quotation at the head of this section indicates; this resonance is symbolic as well as naturalistic, since according to Robert Kelley, ‘Messiaen's interest in the natural world extends much further than birdsong. The noises and rhythmic qualities of natural events, such as the tides, waterfalls, and wind, tend to appear in Messiaen's music, and especially in his bird pieces.’

Drawing on the possibilities offered by his choice of modes of limited transposition, Messiaen’s music stakes out the boundaries of a particular sound world in which natural phenomena are interpreted as musically rich materials. For Messiaen, birds are as musical as human beings are. Panksepp and Trevarthen point out a number of similarities between infant and bird musicality that speak in support of Messiaen’s intuitions in saying (2010: 109):

[T}he brain mechanisms for birdsong appear to grow like the brain mechanisms for practice and learning of speech in children. Research on the part of the brain of a bird necessary for the performance, sharing and



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learning of song has revealed that young birds must hear and experiment with motor performances of their own song if they are to learn from a tutor how to maintain the more elaborate adult song and how to discriminate the songs of other individuals, skills that establish them as mature members of a community. This active vocal learning of expressions of self and others, and its brain mechanisms, has been compared to an infant learning to speak.

For these authors, this research into how birds learn provides evidence for a theory of proto-musicality, implicitly arguing that humans are not the only musical species on this planet. With respect to infant behaviour, Ian Cross defines the concept in these terms, indicating how ‘patterns of sound and action’are central to the idea of protomusicality (2003:80):

These protomusicalbehaviours involve production of and response to patterns of sound andaction, entail temporally-controlled interactions involving synchrony and turntaking,and are employed both in the modulation and regulation of affective state and in the achievement and control of joint attention.

At the same time, it is not given to us to know whether the songbird ever performs for the sake of pure musical enjoyment or whether she understands her activity as ‘musical’ in the same way as human beings do.4

Perspectives from neuroscience continue to contribute to a renewed understanding of the evolution and functionsof the human brain. While we cannot assume that it is possibleto know everything about this new terrain, technological advances in our ability to measure brain activity will no doubt change the research landscape substantially in the near future. I believe that no matter how much science is able to determine about the make-up of the human brain, there will still be limits to knowledge.As Lawrence Zbikowski states (2006: 128-129), music perception is a highly complex activity invoking higher-order structural processes, to which, we might argue, the songbird does not have access, because of her limited brain capabilities:

[U]nderstanding music is not simply a matter of processing auditory signals — it involves a number of higher-order processes that humans use in a variety of ways to structure their understanding of the world. These processes include, but are not limited to, categorization, cross-domain mapping, and the use of conceptual models. It is important to emphasize that these processes are embodied,in two senses: first, they are part of the way the mind and brain connect to and structure interactions with the outside world; second, they arise from more basic cognitive processes that operate on a preconceptual level.

Understanding Zbikowski’s comments in terms of the division of labour betweenright and left hemispheres gives us a neuroscientific explanation of the difference between perception and interpretation with the right hemisphere ‘receiving’ sonic phenomena as raw sonic data, while trying to ‘make sense of things,’ to impose order, and to detect patterns becomes the task of the left. In a world teeming with patterns, embodied humans and other organisms connect to environments by taking advantage of a basic adaptive impulse, that of pattern-recognition.

4In this regard, see Thomas Nagel (1974).



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This adaptive behaviour has enabled us to frame experience as a more or less regular series of related occurrences, so paving the way for aesthetic and creative imaginative possibilities grounded in adaptive drives.By drawing on this common aspect of the innate human inclination towards regular patterns, composers have used invariant properties of musical patterns in different ways according to conventionally appropriate musical grammars in different eras.

Appendix 1

Fig. 1: Messiaen’s modes of limited transposition (from Pople)



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Acknowledgements

This material is based upon work supported financially by the National Research Foundation. Any opinion, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and therefore the NRF does not accept any liability thereto.

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Understanding the Songbird: Some Aspects of Pattern in Musical Composition and Perception

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