There is something paradoxical about the fact that while whales and dolphins produce some of the ... more There is something paradoxical about the fact that while whales and dolphins produce some of the most complex vocalizations on Earth, they have little political representation or ‘voice’ and despite the success of past anti-whaling campaigns, continue to face existential threats from entanglement, ship strikes and underwater noise pollution. In this article, I argue that this paradox is sustained by a belief in human exceptionalism ‐ exemplified by the claim that music is unique to humans ‐ and review biological and musicological evidence that contradicts this claim. Overcoming the paradox may require more than logical argument, however, and I survey the use of humpback whale song field recordings in works of human music, analysing them along the dimensions of ‘distance’ and ‘difference’. I argue that although it is important to recognize the continuity between human music and humpback song, a more effective use of whale song recordings also requires attention to be paid to the diff...
Focus on the evolutionary origins of musicality has been neglected relative to attention on langu... more Focus on the evolutionary origins of musicality has been neglected relative to attention on language, so these new proposals are welcome stimulants. We argue for a broad comparative approach to understanding how the elements of musicality evolved, and against the use of overly simplistic evolutionary accounts.
We describe a project in which several collaborators adapted an existing instrument to make it ca... more We describe a project in which several collaborators adapted an existing instrument to make it capable of playing expressively in music based on the microtonal scale characterised by equal divsion of the octave into 19 tones (“19-EDO”). Our objective was not just to build this instrument, however, but also to produce a well-formed piece of music which would exploit it idiomatically, in a performance which would provide listeners with a pleasurable and satisfying musical experience. Hence, consideration of the extent and limits of the playing-techniques of the resulting instrument (a “Wind-Controller”) and of appropriate approaches to the composition of music for it were an integral part of the project from the start. Moreover, the intention was also that the piece, though grounded in the musical characteristics of the 19-EDO scale, would nevertheless have a recognisable relationship with what Dimitri Tymoczko (2010) has called the “Extended Common Practice” of the last millennium. S...
Culture can be defined as “group typical behaviour patterns shared by members of a community that... more Culture can be defined as “group typical behaviour patterns shared by members of a community that rely on socially learned and transmitted information” (Laland and Hoppitt, 2003, p. 151). Once thought to be a distinguishing characteristic of humans relative to other animals (Dean et al., 2014) it is now generally accepted to exist more widely, with especially abundant evidence in non-human primates, cetaceans, and birds (Rendell and Whitehead, 2001; Aplin, 2019; Whiten, 2021). More recently, cumulative cultural evolution (CCE) has taken on this distinguishing role (Henrich, 2015; Laland, 2018). CCE, it is argued, allows humans, uniquely, to ratchet up the complexity or efficiency of cultural traits over time. This “ratchet effect” (Tomasello, 1994) gives the capacity to accumulate beneficial modifications over time beyond the capacities of a single individual (Sasaki and Biro, 2017). Mesoudi and Thornton (2018) define a core set of criteria for identifying CCE in humans and non-huma...
Several projects have successfully used 3D-printing technology to produce viable musical instrume... more Several projects have successfully used 3D-printing technology to produce viable musical instruments. Such instruments are normally replicas of existing ones with normal intonation. The authors have previously constructed microtonal rehearsal aids and musical instruments for the performance of 19-EDO music, and have compared the use of conventional clarinets using alternative fingerings and modification of pitch through embouchure with performances based on augmented wind controllers and synthesizers. Both approaches compromise the performance potential of the instrument in different ways. We now seek to create a new microtonal clarinet design by 3D-printing an instrument designed to render 19-EDO scales specifically. An object-oriented acoustic model of the instrument has been constructed in C++. A programmatic description of an arbitrary clarinet was written in OpenSCAD, a 3D modeling language, to permit physical realisation of instruments that were acoustically modeled. The softw...
There is something paradoxical about the fact that while whales and dolphins produce some of the ... more There is something paradoxical about the fact that while whales and dolphins produce some of the most complex vocalizations on Earth, they have little political representation or ‘voice’ and despite the success of past anti-whaling campaigns, continue to face existential threats from entanglement, ship strikes and underwater noise pollution. In this article, I argue that this paradox is sustained by a belief in human exceptionalism ‐ exemplified by the claim that music is unique to humans ‐ and review biological and musicological evidence that contradicts this claim. Overcoming the paradox may require more than logical argument, however, and I survey the use of humpback whale song field recordings in works of human music, analysing them along the dimensions of ‘distance’ and ‘difference’. I argue that although it is important to recognize the continuity between human music and humpback song, a more effective use of whale song recordings also requires attention to be paid to the diff...
Focus on the evolutionary origins of musicality has been neglected relative to attention on langu... more Focus on the evolutionary origins of musicality has been neglected relative to attention on language, so these new proposals are welcome stimulants. We argue for a broad comparative approach to understanding how the elements of musicality evolved, and against the use of overly simplistic evolutionary accounts.
We describe a project in which several collaborators adapted an existing instrument to make it ca... more We describe a project in which several collaborators adapted an existing instrument to make it capable of playing expressively in music based on the microtonal scale characterised by equal divsion of the octave into 19 tones (“19-EDO”). Our objective was not just to build this instrument, however, but also to produce a well-formed piece of music which would exploit it idiomatically, in a performance which would provide listeners with a pleasurable and satisfying musical experience. Hence, consideration of the extent and limits of the playing-techniques of the resulting instrument (a “Wind-Controller”) and of appropriate approaches to the composition of music for it were an integral part of the project from the start. Moreover, the intention was also that the piece, though grounded in the musical characteristics of the 19-EDO scale, would nevertheless have a recognisable relationship with what Dimitri Tymoczko (2010) has called the “Extended Common Practice” of the last millennium. S...
Culture can be defined as “group typical behaviour patterns shared by members of a community that... more Culture can be defined as “group typical behaviour patterns shared by members of a community that rely on socially learned and transmitted information” (Laland and Hoppitt, 2003, p. 151). Once thought to be a distinguishing characteristic of humans relative to other animals (Dean et al., 2014) it is now generally accepted to exist more widely, with especially abundant evidence in non-human primates, cetaceans, and birds (Rendell and Whitehead, 2001; Aplin, 2019; Whiten, 2021). More recently, cumulative cultural evolution (CCE) has taken on this distinguishing role (Henrich, 2015; Laland, 2018). CCE, it is argued, allows humans, uniquely, to ratchet up the complexity or efficiency of cultural traits over time. This “ratchet effect” (Tomasello, 1994) gives the capacity to accumulate beneficial modifications over time beyond the capacities of a single individual (Sasaki and Biro, 2017). Mesoudi and Thornton (2018) define a core set of criteria for identifying CCE in humans and non-huma...
Several projects have successfully used 3D-printing technology to produce viable musical instrume... more Several projects have successfully used 3D-printing technology to produce viable musical instruments. Such instruments are normally replicas of existing ones with normal intonation. The authors have previously constructed microtonal rehearsal aids and musical instruments for the performance of 19-EDO music, and have compared the use of conventional clarinets using alternative fingerings and modification of pitch through embouchure with performances based on augmented wind controllers and synthesizers. Both approaches compromise the performance potential of the instrument in different ways. We now seek to create a new microtonal clarinet design by 3D-printing an instrument designed to render 19-EDO scales specifically. An object-oriented acoustic model of the instrument has been constructed in C++. A programmatic description of an arbitrary clarinet was written in OpenSCAD, a 3D modeling language, to permit physical realisation of instruments that were acoustically modeled. The softw...
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Papers by Alex South