Rockin' robins.On a journey that is scientific and artistic, personal and purposeful, Donald Kroodsma seeks to discover why some birds sing and others don't; and whether their songs are inherited through genes or learned through observation. In The Singing Life of Birds: The Art and Science of Listening to Birdsong birdsong. Song, call notes, and certain mechanical sounds constitute the language of birds. Song is produced in the syrinx, whose firm walls are derived from the rings of the trachea, and is modified by the larynx and tongue. (Houghton Mifflin Houghton Mifflin Company is a leading educational publisher in the United States. The company's headquarters is located in Boston's Back Bay. It publishes textbooks, instructional technology materials, assessments, reference works, and fiction and non-fiction for both young readers , $28 with CD), Kroodsma describes his travels around the globe, studying the behavior of birds and the physics of their songs. His lyrical, informal prose is accompanied by scientific diagrams of pitches and notes--musical transcriptions written in kilohertz One thousand cycles per second. See Hertz. rather than eighth notes. The accompanying CD includes the songs of many of the world's most famous species. David Rothenberg uses art and science to take on similar questions in Why Birds Sing: A Journey into the Mystery of Bird Song (Basic Books, $26). The result, though, is utterly different: Rothenberg's story is deeply philosophical. "The humble question, Why do birds sing? forces us to reconsider what music is and where it comes from, what sorts of thinking animals might do and to what extent we can communicate with them," he writes. Rothenberg is also a participant in the passerine passerine Any perching bird. All passerines belong to the largest order of birds, Passeriformes, and have feet specialized for holding onto a horizontal branch (perching). The passerine foot has three forward-directed toes and one backward-directed toe. orchestra rather than just an observer. A composer and jazz clarinetist, he seeks to understand why birds sing by playing music with them, and his text is inspired by the whimsical whim·si·cal adj. 1. Determined by, arising from, or marked by whim or caprice. See Synonyms at arbitrary. 2. Erratic in behavior or degree of unpredictability: a whimsical personality. collaborations that result. Their give-and-take improvisation can be heard on the CD Why Birds Sing, which is sold separately and offers "12 different ways of making human music out of bird song." Benny Goodman Noun 1. Benny Goodman - United States clarinetist who in 1934 formed a big band (including black as well as white musicians) and introduced a kind of jazz known as swing (1909-1986) Benjamin David Goodman, Goodman, King of Swing , eat your heart out.--R.S. |
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