Beyond Imitation: Birdsong and Vocal Learning
Wed, Oct 25, 2017
6:30 PM–8:00 PM
Room C198
Why do birds sing? Could we call what they sing and how they sing music? Of all nonhuman animals, birds teach us to check anthropocentrism in music, or, as David Rothenberg puts it in Why Birds Sing (2005), birds check “the conceit that humanity is needed to find beauty in the natural world.” But how do they learn songs? Do they invent and compose them or “parrot” what they hear? Join us for a discussion between animal behavioral psychologist Professor Ofer Tchernichovski (Hunter College) and distinguished professor of philosophy and music, composer and clarinetist, Professor David Rothenberg (NJIT).
Cosponsored by the Ecocriticism Working Group.
https://vimeo.com/241713084Participants
David Rothenberg
ECM recording artist David Rothenberg has performed and recorded on clarinet with Pauline Oliveros, Peter Gabriel, Ray Phiri, Suzanne Vega, Scanner, Glen Velez, Elliot Sharp, Markus Reuter, and the Karnataka College of Percussion. Most of work has an environmental theme and involves the sounds of nature, live and in the studio. He has sixteen CDs out under his own name, including “On the Cliffs of the Heart,” named one of the top ten releases of 1995 by Jazziz magazine and “One Dark Night I Left My Silent House,” a duet album with pianist Marilyn Crispell, called “une petite miracle” by Le Monde and named by The Village Voice one of the ten best CDs of 2010. Rothenberg is the author of Why Birds Sing, book and CD, published in seven languages and the subject of a BBC television documentary. He is also the author of numerous other books on music, art, and nature, including Thousand Mile Song, about making music with whales, and Survival of the Beautiful, about aesthetics in evolution. His book and CD Bug Music, featuring the sounds of the entomological world, has been featured on PBS News Hour and in the New Yorker. His latest recordings are Cicada Dream Band, Cool Spring and Berlin Bülbül. Rothenberg is distinguished professor of philosophy and music at the New Jersey Institute of Technology.
Christina Katopodis
Christina Katopodis is a doctoral candidate in English at The Graduate Center, CUNY. Her dissertation, “American Transcendentalism: Widening the Field of Search for Music,” examines the influence of sonic vibration and music on Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and William James. Recipient of a Provost’s Digital Innovation Grant, she is concurrently working on a digital humanities project called The Walden Soundscape, building a website that features sound recordings from Walden Pond in all four seasons. She is a co-Chair of Better to Speak, a women adjunct advocacy group at the Graduate Center, and teaches at Hunter College. Author of her own pedagogy blog, she is also a guest blogger for Pedagogy & American Literary Studies, and a Twitter curator for We the Humanities.
Ofer Tchernichovski
Professor of Psychology Ofer Tchernichovski has served as the primary investigator or co-investigator in numerous studies of birdsong published in Current Biology (2016), Nature (2013), Neuroscience (2012), and Science (2001). Most of his publications address mechanisms of developmental vocal learning in songbirds. He studies song development across generations and discovered how vocal culture is established de novo under controlled conditions.
His lab, the Laboratory of Vocal Learning at Hunter College, CUNY, pioneered quantitative analysis of entire vocal development in songbirds. They discovered how vocal sounds differentiate during early development and how sleep affects vocal learning from moment to moment and over development. They advanced techniques for tracking the development of vocal combinatorial capacity in songbirds and in human infants. The lab developed the vocal robot method for studying the coordination of calls in zebra finches, and those working in the lab have vast experience in tracking vocal learning in songbirds, and in controlling social environments of zebra finches during song development. Since 2001, Tchernichovski’s lab has shared birdsong analysis techniques with the community. Over the years, they combined those tools to build software called Sound Analysis Pro, which is now used by many labs.
