::: NightinGala :::

PROGRAM

June 12, Thursday – 14.00-17.00 – Main hall
Symposium in Zoomusicology: The nightingale song between art and research (1st part)

14.00–14.50 Dario Martinelli (University of Helsinki)
Zoomusicology and the analysis of nightingale songs

14.50–15.20 Lina Navickaitė (Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre)
Centuries of nightingale-inspired music

15.20-15.30 Break

15.30–16.00 Emily Doolittle (University of Princeton)
A (Human) Composer's Understanding of Nightingale Song

16.00–16.20 Jorma Sorjonen (University of Joensuu)
The daughters of Zeus

16.20–16.40 Jyrki Alakuijala (University of Oulu)
On algorithmic methods for bird song processing

16.40–17.00 Harri Viitanen (composer, Helsinki cathedral)
How nightingales become composition

June 12, Thursday – 18.00 – Leonora Sali

Concert: NightinGig, a musical interaction with nightingales

Kristiina Ilmonen, wind instruments, voice
Anna-Kaisa Liedes, voice
Timo Väänänen, kantele
Pilvet päätäni pitävät

Harri Viitanen, tape
Katharsis

Dario Martinelli, tape
Nightingale, you are the one
With a live performance by Nora Lähteenmäki and Pärttyli Rinne
Nightingale, where are you?

19.00-19.20 Break

Herman Rechberger, tape + ethnic percussions
Drumming with birds

Petri Kuljuntausta, tape + live electronics
Whistles, trills and clicks
With a live video by Sami van Ingen

Robert Jürjendal, guitar, loops
Petri Kuljuntausta, live sampling
David Rothenberg, clarinet, soundscapes, laptop
Nighghghtingale

June 13, Friday – 10.00-13.00 – Main hall

Symposium in Zoomusicology: The nightingale song between art and research (2nd part)

10.00–10.50 David Rothenberg (New Jersey Institute of Technology)
The Song of the Nightingale: Why Science and Art Must Be Combined to Decipher It

10.50–11.20 Marc Naguib (Netherlands Institute of Ecology)
How and why nightingales sing: a behavioral ecological perspective

11.20-11.50 Helena Telkänranta (The Finnish Association for Nature Conservation)
Emotional connectedness of people to nature: the nightingale as an acoustic ambassador

11.50-12.00 Break

12.00–12.30 Henrike Hultsch (University of Berlin)
From Hearing to Singing – Song Learning and Development in the Common Nightingale, Luscinia megarhynchos

12.30–13.00 Ann Warde (Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology)
Nightingale Song: Musical Analysis/Scientific Synthesis

13.00–13.30 Ofer Tchernichovski (City College of New York)
Analysis of the nightingale song structure: features, clusters and rhythms

SEMINAR

The nightingale song between art and research

The massive presence of nightingales in musical composition (all over history, from troubadours to contemporary composers without significant breaks) suggests us a number of reflections that have not only to do with the undeniable charm that the sounds emitted by these birds exercise on the musicians’ sensibility. It also informs us about how this charm, in its aesthetic significance, has survived centuries of (often radically) different ways of conceiving the musical art.

To the consistency of this appeal one must then add the growing scientific and academic interest towards nightingale songs in a sense that is firstly ethological and then specifically musicological. The use of the word song, as applied to these birds and to other non-human animals, has been first metaphorical, then functional, then – finally – meant literarily. That was the birth of zoomusicology, a discipline founded by composer/musicologist François-Bernard Mâche back in 1983, and now enjoying a constantly larger following, starting from Finland, where the very first academic course on the subject was established at Helsinki University.

The NightinGala seminar aims to virtually cover all these areas of investigation, namely:

1) The artistic relation between nightingales and musicians, including its history and its pragmatics;
2) The scientific-ethological investigation on nightingale songs, starting from purely technical aspects (e.g., recording and spectrogram analysis)
3) The zoomusicological input to the issue: is it possible to analyse nightingale songs in a purely musicological sense?

The seminar will last 8 hours altogether, and will be articulated in two sessions of 4 hours each. With the exception of the 1 hour long opening presentation of each session, all other presentations will last 30 minutes, including some time for discussion.

The first session will be entitled “Nightingales in musical practice and history” and will focus on the musical-artistic part, both in terms of direct musical experiences from composers and musicians, and historical illustration of the role of nightingale songs in music development.

The second session will be entitled “Nightingales in natural sciences and zoomusicology”, and will focus on theoretical-musicological approaches on the one hand, and empirical/applied research from such fields like ethology, ornithology and bioacoustics.

In addition to the seminar, a workshop will be designed with the intention of engaging the seminar audience and speakers into a more interactive (and somehow practical) form of participation.

Program

June 12, Thursday – 14.00-17.00 – Main hall

(1st part)

14.00–14.50 Dario Martinelli (University of Helsinki)
Zoomusicology and the analysis of nightingale songs
ABSTRACT: The presentation will provide a short introduction to the history and the main theoretical stands of zoomusicology, and will then proceed to analyse the specific case of the Luscinia luscinia species.

14.50–15.20 Lina Navickaitė (Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre)
Centuries of nightingale-inspired music
ABSTRACT: Here, the author tries to present a historical survey of the usage of nightingale-related melodies, titles or even characters in classical (or so considered nowadays) music. From Middle Ages troubadours to Olivier Messiaen and later composers, this paper will demonstrate the recurrent inspiration that the composers of art music have been drawing from the nightingale song.

15.20-15.30 Break

15.30–16.00 Emily Doolittle (University of Princeton)
A (Human) Composer's Understanding of Nightingale Song
ABSTRACT: In this presentation I will explore thrush nightingale (Lusicinia luscinia) songs from a human musical perspective. I have approached these songs as I would the music of any composer, looking at what defines their style and what makes them effective on a musical level.

16.00–16.20 Jorma Sorjonen (University of Joensuu)
The daughters of Zeus
ABSTRACT: According to the Greek mythology the two nightingale species Luscinia luscinia (Progné) and L. megarhynchos (Philoméle) are the daughters of Zeus. Due to their powerful and melodic songs the nightingale has inspired composers and poets. The mystic song during warm and light Finnish summer nights has also inspired a famous Finnish poet Lauri Viita, who wrote an excelent poem “Northern Nightingale”. In spite of his style of poetry the message of behavioural ecology was also perfectly correct. The Philoméle has very large repertoire withouth any local dialects. The Progne has smaller repertoire but great local and habitatical variation. The Nightingales (Progné) on Kursk in Russien and the mixed singing Nightingales (Progné) on the sympatric area of L. luscinia and L. megarhynchos in Poland have famous and exceptional beautiful songs.

16.20–16.40 Jyrki Alakuijala (University of Oulu)
On algorithmic methods for bird song processing
ABSTRACT: The presentation will illustrate the methods for processing sound that the author has found interesting for composing with bird song material. These methods include variable tuning, adaptive tuning, sensory dissonance modeling and optimization, enforced virtual pitch, and manually copied (drawn) and re-synthetized bird song spectrograms.

16.40–17.00 Harri Viitanen (composer, Helsinki cathedral)
How nightingales become composition
ABSTRACT: The presentation will illustrate the process through which the author has transformed the bird songs into actual human musical material, and what is the conversion that produces artistically the most interesting musical results.

June 13, Friday – 10.00-13.00 – Main hall

(2nd part)

10.00–10.50 David Rothenberg (New Jersey Institute of Technology)
The Song of the Nightingale: Why Science and Art Must Be Combined to Decipher It
ABSTRACT: Biologists have been trying to decipher the structure of nightingale song for the past thirty years, and much has been discovered about how the birds use their singing in courtship and territory defense behavior. However, little has been learned about how the very complex song itself is structured, and this topic might be better investigated by the involvement of more musicians and musicologists into the research process. First I will talk about why this hasn't yet happened, and explain what insights musically trained researchers might be better able to elucidate than biologists, who often rely on simplistic statistical models. Scientists tend to count the number of distinctly different syllables as an indication of song complexity, NOT looking at how different phrases are combined to form a musically intricate whole. They often say issues of structure and complexity rely too much on human listener bias, not objective data-gathering. I will explain why this is not the case, why musicology need not be any less objective, or more subjective, than the simple counting favored by science. A better method for objectively analyzing complex bird songs will be proposed.

10.50–11.20 Marc Naguib (Netherlands Institute of Ecology)
How and why nightingales sing: a behavioral ecological perspective
ABSTRACT: Nightingale song is among the most elaborate vocal signals in the animal kingdom. Its beauty, diversity and melodious tone have inspired humans in many regards. But why do male nightinagles actually sing? Why at night and what do females do? The song of male nightingales has evolved as it serves a specific function in the biology of this species. But what is this function and how can we study it? Which information does a female extract from a song it can enjoy listening over so many hours at night? How do males communicate with their song and what do they say? In this contribution I will provide some insides into the biological function of nightingale song by presenting a range of different experiments we have been conducting over many years to shed light on the function of song in male-male communication and to shed light on which roles females play in the evolution of the males' singing behaviour.

11.20-11.50 Helena Telkänranta (The Finnish Association for Nature Conservation)
Emotional connectedness of people to nature: the nightingale as an acoustic ambassador
ABSTRACT: We sometimes think about the appreciation for nature as a modern phenomenon, but the nightingale provides a good example of a species that has generated positive emotions in people throughout centuries. In 19th century Helsinki, newspapers reported hundreds of people gathering in the Kaisaniemi Park in the early summer, with the specific aim of hearing the famous nightingale. The evening air in the park was filled not only with his song but also with the applause of the fascinated audience. In this talk, nightingale is discussed as an example of which characteristics in an animal have the most potential for creating a feeling of connectedness in people. Such discussion often focuses mainly on the appearance and visible behaviour of animals, but as acoustic experiences often speak to human emotions even more powerfully than visual ones, the world of acoustics may hold interesting unused potential for promoting a deeper motivation for nature conservation and a richer experience of nature.

11.50-12.00 Break

12.00–12.30 Henrike Hultsch (University of Berlin)
From Hearing to Singing – Song Learning and Development in the Common Nightingale, Luscinia megarhynchos
ABSTRACT: Like many other behaviours, the development of birdsong is a kind of motor learning. However, it is outstanding among ontogenetic processes in animals in that, like human language, it is based on the imitation of acoustic models acquired through perceptional learning before (auditory learning). For the analyses, this provides two bases of reference to which pattern ontogeny can be compared: the organization of input patterns and that of target patterns, i.e. the crystallized adult song. In some species, such as the nightingale, song development lasts for several months, which allows to trace in detail the ontogenetic progression for various song parameters, such as syntax and phonology, temporal structure and the development of the hierarchical organization of song performance. The seminar examines how memory and developmental features interact to produce a repertoire of more than 100 distinct songs (‘strophes’) used as units of communication during singing.

12.30–13.00 Ann Warde (Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology)
Nightingale Song: Musical Analysis/Scientific Synthesis
ABSTRACT: The author has used investigations of the musical notions of gesture, dynamics, rhythmic and metrical analysis, phrase structure, timbral interrelationships, and pattern analysis at different scales to create an audible analysis (and composition) based on recordings of nightingale birdsong. The author will discuss the processes involved in this analysis and its immediate results, and present the sound composition as well. The intention is to provide the listener with increasing insight into the relationships and structures that result from this analysis, in a way which will hopefully enable the audible perception of these relationships and encourage the use of any aural knowledge that may be developed through this process to hear more deeply into nightingale vocalizations. Work has been performed with recordings of several different individuals of the species Luscinia megarhynchos and Luscinia luscinia, and hopefully the results of the analysis/synthesis will shed light on differences among individuals as well as cross-species similarities.

13.00–13.30 Ofer Tchernichovski (City College of New York)
Analysis of the nightingale song structure: features, clusters and rhythms
ABSTRACT: The author will analyze a large sample (about 20,000 syllables) of one nightingale thrush. He segmented the song, calculated simple song features (pitch, frequency modulation, Wiener entropy, etc) using Sound Analysis Pro software, and then looked at their distribution. Two features, pitch and Wiener-entropy, were found to be sufficient to uncover robust clusters (syllable types). One large cluster of high Wiener entropy, which includes harsh (fricative like) sounds, and 10-20 clusters of low entropy and a very accurate pitch. The relative gap between the pitches of those clusters was often at around 700Hz, approximately F scale. A preliminary analysis of the rhythm structure shows rhythm stability over the entire singing. At the syntax level, there is a strong tendency to shift from the high entropy cluster (fricatives like sounds) to clusters of low pitch. More careful look at syntax transition might reveal a common ground between feature based analysis and musical representation of those songs.

CONCERT

At the Nightingala Festival the audience will hear music inspired by nightingale songs. The festival has commissioned works from the composers and musicians, who have especially specialized on animal
sounds, and what is even more important, they all will arrive to the festival to perform live their new works first time.

The commissioned works will show a new sides from the bird songs, the performance formats varies from the composed works to improvisations, and mix of these. The nightingale song lives in these works aside of acoustic instruments and human voice. On the other hand the audience will get a closer contact to the subject when the bird song has, for example, slowed-down in the digital compositions. Only then the human ear has chance to hear the microscopic nuances and rich sound colors of fast bird songs.

At the festival American clarinetist David Rothenberg and Estonian guitarist Robert Jürjendal will play along with special kind of nightingale field recordings. This project continues forwards Rothenberg's famous bird project entitled Why Birds Sing. During the years composer Petri Kuljuntausta has created collection of compositions from the animal and nature sounds, and at the Nightingala Festival concert he will transform the bird songs to unexpected spectral dimensions by the means of digital sound technology. Composer Herman Rechberger will perform his new work "Drumming with Birds", where the audience will have a very special chance to hear his drumming along with the birds. Folk musician Kristiina Ilmonen and her group will perform improvisations where the musicians has taken influences from the bird songs and their presence in folk tradition.

Italian zoomusicologist Dario Martinelli will arrange a special musical performance on nightingale song, where his music has motivated the collaborators, Pärttyli Rinne and Nora Lähteenmäki, to broaden the composition with a performance of contemporary theatre. Martinelli's composition will be entirely based on nightingale sounds, in most cases heavily edited and "filtered" through the compositional paradigm of error aesthetics (white noises, clips, random-generated accidents, etc.).

At the festival will be also heard Harri Viitanen's tape-composition "Katharsis", where the composer has created illusion on forest and its birds with the help of surrounding eight-channel multispeaker technology.

In the context of Nightingala Festival concerts will be also released new music CDs, where the music has composed under the influence of bird and animal sounds. The artists behind the new releases are the
festival visitors Rothenberg, Jürjendal, Kuljuntausta and Martinelli.

When the Nightingala Festival will be arranged next time in 2009, the invited composers and musicians will arrange an outdoor performance where the real nightingales will take part to the concert and accompany the music performances. In 2009 will be also released a CD release, which is a compilation on the all music performances recorded at the Nightingala 2008 Festival.

Program

June 12, Thursday – 18.00 – Leonora Sali

Concert: NightinGig, a musical interaction with nightingales

Kristiina Ilmonen, wind instruments, voice
Anna-Kaisa Liedes, voice
Timo Väänänen, kantele
Pilvet päätäni pitävät

Harri Viitanen, tape
Katharsis

Dario Martinelli, tape
Nightingale, you are the one
With a live performance by Nora Lähteenmäki and Pärttyli Rinne
Nightingale, where are you?

19.00-19.20 Break

Herman Rechberger, tape + ethnic percussions
Drumming with birds

Petri Kuljuntausta, tape + live electronics
Whistles, trills and clicks
With a live video by Sami van Ingen

Robert Jürjendal, guitar, loops
Petri Kuljuntausta, live sampling
David Rothenberg, clarinet, soundscapes, laptop
Nighghghtingale