David Rothenberg - Natural Responses to Music

Rothenberg's main goal is to interact with other forms of life by creating music together with them. He has spent quite some time with research on the natural songs birds sing, as well as on the songs whales sing. He then came to the conclusion that humans are not the only ones communicating or expressing themselves through music. Above that, some animals use music naturally to attract other animals or, in the cases of male whales, to simply sing. While Rothenberg states that birds merely mimiked the sounds he played on his clarinett, whales played their songs with him. They responded to the frequencies, the tones, the duration and contributed with their production of tones. 

Rothenberg here found out that male whales do not sing to attract females, which is something that naturally occurs with other animal species, but they create songs that are adaptable. Rothenberg learned that male whales, independently of where they "live", produce the same musical tones as others and if one male starts to make a few changes within the song by producing a few higher or lower sounds, the other male whales "magically" adapt their music to harmonize. This is a phenomena difficult to explain since the whales from a far away region have not heard the songs from the whales from another region. However, just like a rumor, the different tones/sounds are adapted by the male whales closer by, and so this goes on and on, reaching even the male whales from far away.

In that sense, Rothenberg played his clarinette in front of male whales to get a musical reaction out of them, as he wanted to see whether he as a human can impact on this phenomena or whether the whales would even give any reaction. 

Although it took many tries and a few weeks, he was able to record the different occasions in which he played the clarinette and male whales responded to the produced sounds with their own singing. They did not, however, only sing anything but they harmonized with the clarinette and produced a shared frequency by also making some adaptions themselves. This is groundbreaking, as Rothenberg then found out that they, unlike the birds, did not mimik him, but actually responded to his music and contributed to it themselves. 

He was the first one to record this and it can eithe be said that he is a genius or the male whales or geniuses. The sounds themselves are different from music produced with technology, as the participants have to actually listen to each other. They hear the tones the other one makes and contribute to the other one's contribution. Like the clarinette, whales can produce very high sounds that are difficult to hear and grasp with the bare ears, but through the amplifiers and through the printed papers of the frequencie, it could be seen that the sound produced by the whales matched the ones produced by the clarinette. 

Rothenberg states for the whales music is not necessarily only a form of communication in the way humans know it, but it can also serve as music simply for the sake of music. This creates the possibility to make music with other species and to not only record their sounds/songs but to make that music together. This is another form of exchange that leads humans closer to nature as they do not observe and research, but they actually interact across the species in a form commonly enjoyed by different species.