Rothenberg vs. The Scientists: Round 1
David Rothenberg
[Terra Nova] • I’m in the middle of writing a book on making music with whales, a project which has taken me to Russia, Canada, and Hawaii, in search of giant sea creatures who want to jam. Sometimes they actually do. But some scientists I run across are more difficult than the whales themselves.
“What do you expect to accomplish with this?” Mark Johnson says, glaring at me. He’s a grizzled New Zealand engineer with a ponytail who works at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. “Why would it surprise you that you got a response? These are acoustically active creatures. I don’t see the point of fucking with animals just for the hell of it. I don’t believe in diving or swimming with whales either.”
I fumble with an answer. “I… just want to see what happens.”
He shakes his head and squints at me. “If you’re trying to learn something about whales which could then translate into a tool for conservation, that’s worth doing. But simply trying to enjoy an event in which the animal doesn’t even know he’s participating, to be honest, I don’t see the point. It doesn’t really yield anything except a gratuitous level of self-satisfaction.”
“Well, Mark, I’m trying not to congratulate myself or pat myself on the back. Music is knowledge, too. I want to learn something and make some interesting sounds, sounds that can’t be made by one species alone.”
“What’s the point if you haven’t got a hypothesis?” he shouts back.
“I do have a hypothesis,” I tell him. “But it’s a musical, not a scientific one. My idea is that there’s more to music than humans can make on their own. A wandering jazz musician could enter a club in Tokyo or Istanbul, climb on stage, and right away join the band. You listen for a familiar sound, some rhythm or chord changes, and try to join in, finding a way to a common music. This is how you make music together with those with whom you cannot speak.”
"Through music you can cross cultural lines, not because music is a universal language, but because musics are fluid languages: they warp, they twist, they open up to foreign sounds. Something new can be produced together by people from different sides of the world. If you are open-minded enough, you might try the same thing with other species."
Johnson still looks skeptical. I quote from the history of science to him. “Other species have other senses of beauty and form. Even Charles Darwin knew that, although biologists seem sometimes to have forgotten. He wrote in The Descent of Man that the beauty in nature was effectively chosen by the animals themselves, over generations of female preference. They liked certain traits, and those were passed on. Each species has its own aesthetic. The particulars of bird music may be some of them. Sound in whales may work the same way. But it is so alien that we really must stretch our ears to get a grasp of it. Besides, showing people how beautiful whale songs are is what really got us interested in saving them.”
“Sure enough,” he still glares back, “but no one had to play a guitar to a humpback to do that. I have every respect imaginable for passive techniques. But the only reason to fuck with something is if you have a well-worked out hypothesis, and a good measurement technique, so you would be able to reasonably conclude that the animal is responding. But a musician might say their expression would be inhibited. So perhaps these approaches are incompatible. For God’s sake leave them alone unless you have a really good reason to bother them. Imagine poking an animal with a stick!”
“Jamming with a whale is not the same as a spear in the ass.”
“Well, how do you know that?” Mark fires back.
“Scientists are the ones who shoot darts into the backs of great baleens, not musicians.” I remind him.
“Sure, most scientists do a terrible job when designing experiments. They’re mutants!” The engineer is a bit agitated.
“So you don’t feel qualified to comment on whether or not whales are intelligent?” I try to change the subject.
“What’s misguided is when we call animals unintelligent. The trouble is that our idea of intelligent is so damn limited that we can only see it when the animal has some great acuity, or if it interacts. Would you call an autistic person interactive? Some are brilliant, but we often don’t understand them because they keep to themselves. One could argue that it is a misguided or dopy animal who interacts with us. Not a smart move to play music with you or get too close to a whale-watching boat. You could end up being chopped up by the motor like that poor orca, Luna.”
“Come on, Mark! Making music with whales is not the same as running over them with a powerboat.”
“Who gave you the right to mess with these animals? If you can’t explain it, you shouldn’t be doing it. Don’t go telling everyone to go out and play music with the whales to share their own interspecies communication fantasies.”
The scientist gets up, ready to leave, but he suddenly smiles. “Right, now that we’ve got all that out of the way, let’s go get a pint.”
Next time: Out on the water trying to play along with humpback whales.
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why is this field limited?
No one discounts it on the basis of science, it's worthwhile as art. There are beautiful etchings of a geo-centric universe. The scientist would never say, "oh those etchings are dumb, throw them away." (unless they were really Autistic. it does happen sometimes. Penn station is an example, but to prevent it again the laws in NY changed.). We judge things by the rulebooks they imply, and when they don't imply one or are vague about it, we make up one that usually is not in the works' best interest.
actually this article makes me sad. not that either of you are at all wrong. but something Laurie Anderson said yesterday (i saw her talk), that scientist and artists are really no different, both really don't know what they are after exactly. sounds like this scientiist exemplied an attitude that bothers you (and maybe you did for him).
art is just another kind of science. bad art is just more bad science. good art is just more good science. There are beuatiful etchings of the geo-centric universe. But the artist, despite misunderstandings in the scientific questions, goes past that, by creating something beautiful, putting in creative flourishes and inspiration.
the scientist in the story should have started with this explanation. all animals respond to frequencies of sound to various degrees, like many human respond to frequencies of light to varying degrees. i know elephants hear frequencies slightly lower than us (about 5hz versus about 12 hz) and would guess whales are similar.
whales call and respond to each other, so they are listening for those "songs". but the fact we call them songs is just a quirk of English, just like the Queen of a hive doesn't actually have any command over the other insects in the hive. Just like you can say "gramma's on the phone" but literally she's a hundred miles away from that piece of plastic in your hand. It's In this case "song" ius just not a meaningful metaphor at all.
instead, think of it like a dog listening with its nose rather than its eyes. by "listening" i just mean sussing out its environment. whales are listening for cues from other whales. the best we can do is trigger some similar responces. just like pouring all kinds of liquids into a gas tank won't fun damentally change how a car behaves. Some liquids will do what gasoline does, but that's about it.
but whales simply do not have the brain anatomy we do. music (almost everything about it boils down to pattern recognition, and/or probably in our complex amygdala and cerebellum) is not significant to them as it is to us. we process music similarly but do a lot more additional mental processing when it comes to music. whales don't. not exactly.
what they do is more like what birds do, the songs are significant, but probably more like instinctual cues and reflexes. the brightly colored scarf will always get your attention at first. Only afterwards can you consciously decide not to look. This is the sort of thing the scientist assumes will be the best you can stumble on. You wouldn't fiund a more attractive scarf this way, just hone down which will turn more heads.
music is not really universal. a jazz saxophonist from the US may create a cool mix sampling a band of Sri Lankan drummers. But that saxophonist is not goiung to put the participants in a Yak Toval (the ritual where the drumming occurs) into a trance or perform an exorcism. To the Sri Lankans the saxophonist would just be creating some disruptive and unmeaningful noise. Whether or not we say "music is universal", doesn't matter. Music is used for very different and very specific things in every culture.
Which brings us back to the artist/scientist conflict. If you are creating art with artists as the audience, that's cool. If you are creating whale sounds with whales as the audience, that's cool. If you want to conduct a test, with scientists as the audience, do that. But mixing up these audiences only gets baffled stares and dumb questions.
If you want to figure out a way to create meaningful music for whales, that would take a lot of scientific understanding. on thge surface, an oxy moron, but you could always stumble onto something unexpected. however, your goal may be as simple as what sounds cause them to do a cool dance they don't ordinarily do. but in art or science there is always some sort of goal. there ius always a target audience. when those things become hazy, people miss the point.
or (as frequently happens more in contemporary art and pre-20th cent. science) the stuff has almost no real use accept to the creator or those interested in that person and not the work itself. but as long as it is blatantly clear this is basking in self indulgence, everyone will love it. who, in thgeir righgt mind, would call Andy Warhol egotistical? But wanting to play music for whales is sorta egotistical. If you want to do it, cool, but go all out then. This straddles art and science as if they were separate entities and creates a conflict (even in you?) that doesn't need to be there.