David Rothenberg and the human urge to communicate with animals

 David Rothenberg’s own website calls him a “musician, composer, author and philosopher-naturalist”. His music is focused on a symbiosis between human and nature, and he is known for his pieces like “Whale Music”, “Why Birds Sing” and “Bug Music”.  With him being born in 1962 he might be the youngest of the composers of the seminar. He also wrote a few books and has published a film, making him a a well rounded artist in different aspects of the industry.

Rothenberg’s approach to music is to play together with animals instead of just recording them. He therefore mixes his own musical talent with that of different animals to create a new mashup of music. While this does seem quite easy to do with birds, as one can usually hear them really well in nature, he also recreated this concept with whales, which proved to be more difficult as they do live under water.

In his work Whale Music Rothenberg analyzed the sounds of humpback whales in the ocean. He claims that “The song of the humpback whale is the most extended patterned vocalization produced by any animal”. While the popular Disney movie Finding Nemo and its successor Finding Dory make fun of the way a whale allegedly sounds, the real sounds whales produce is much different than the one portrayed in the movie. Rothenberg claims that sounds of humpback whales are much different to e.g. dolphins and other whales.

He claims that in contrast to his observations of bird songs, the songs of whales are constantly changing during the breeding season, which seems to be triggered by the breeding season itself and acts like an internal clock in the whales. Rothenberg states that the songs of whales are more musical than the songs of birds as they have an extended clear structure. He describes experiments conducted by Peter Tyack and Louis Herman in the 1970s and 1980s and how his findings correspond to their results. To conduct his research David Rothenberg “spent several weeks off Maui, Hawaii, trying to interact musically with humpback whales” from January to February 2007. He did so with his clarinet and an apparatus which was able to play music into the water.

Personally, I do understand his urge trying to communicate with animals in a way. I have pets and sometimes I really would like to understand them. In their own way, I am sure both Rothenberg and the animals he gets in contact with also do understand each other on a certain level.