The notion that animals instructed humanity in the art of song "before art began" formed the basis of a presentation delivered at Gresham College by Professor Milton Mermikides, exploring the profound connection between the natural world and musical composition. Gresham College highlighted how humans, viewed as "very late to the life on this planet like gate crashes," inherited the language of music from other species.
The profound historical inspiration drawn from the animal kingdom is evident in ancient instruments like the Goshin, an ancient Chinese zither dating back 3,000 years. This simple, tabletop, fretless guitar was studied not only to enhance musicality but also to deepen one's "connection to the natural world". Handbooks for the Goshin contained instructions using vivid animal analogies to teach precise techniques. For example, plucking a string with two fingers is likened to a "wild goose plucks a reed stalk with its bill". Other colorful analogies include "cold ravens pecking at snow" for staccato, and "the cry of a monkey while climbing a tree" for vibrato. One specific technique, "White butterflies exploring flowers," requires finding a precise position, pressing very lightly, and then disappearing, leaving a "white spectral tone," which is the exact movement needed to perform a harmonic on an open string.
The influence continues into modern music, as highlighted in the Gresham College presentation. Blues guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughn noted that the blues was inspired by sounds such as a train or the rhythm of a horse walking. This rhythm, characterized by a swing and added brightness on the shorter note ("Gadump"), is described as the "heartbeat of the Texas shuffle". The rhythms are so infused that they can be layered on top of each other, making it difficult to tell where one starts and the other ends.
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Animals also inspire composers through their inherent character and movement, a technique masterfully used by Saint-Saëns in his Carnival of the Animals. To represent an elephant, Saint-Saëns used a slow tempo, low sounds, the noble key of E flat, and a hornlike tone. The fast, weighty movement of wild donkeys is represented by low pitch with high subdivisions. The bouncing of kangaroos is mapped in pitch space, punctuated by stops as they look around with curiosity. Conversely, the mysterious movement of fish is captured by fast, twinkling sounds, layered over the slow sounds of the water around them. The elegant swan is depicted through a slow, elegant melody set atop fast, rippling piano water.
Beyond inspiration, animal movement can be directly mapped to musical parameters. As noted in the discussion from Gresham College, an early Gresham professor of geometry, Robert Hook, once remarked to Samuel Pepys that he could tell how fast an insect's wing was beating by the musical pitch it produced. This establishes a direct line between animal movement and musical pitch. Rimsky-Korsakov intuitively captured the motion of a bee into a melody. By mapping pitch onto distance from the hive, the circular trajectory of a bee's sophisticated movement, including its scurrying and efficient use of space, can be translated into bee-like musical motions. Similarly, the melody of The Lark Ascending directly mirrors a bird's flight pattern: exerting energy to flap to a height, coasting, and then exerting more energy to gain altitude.
The most profound and consistent influence is bird song, which has inspired countless pieces over 3,000 years. Birds utilize pitch categories (distinct pitches), rhythmic units (clear, repeated phrases), and ornamentation (trills and accelerandos). Beethoven famously embedded the calls of the cuckoo, quail, and nightingale in his Pastoral symphony. Twentieth-century composer Olivier Messiaen believed that birds were the "greatest musicians on the planet" and dedicated himself to capturing the sounds of 77 different bird species in France in his extensive Catalogue d’oiseaux. Messiaen saw birds as "divine messengers" and aimed to "give bird songs for those who dwell in cities and paint colors for those who see none".
Modern technology reveals even more hidden music, such as the complex, microtonal melodies found by slowing down the fast, fleeting songs of birds like the song thrush and the Eurasian wren, which contains what is described as "Eurasian jazz".
The discussion also touched on the astonishing evidence that music is not uniquely human. The Eurasian Scops owl maintains a metric consistency in its single hoot that "rivaled professional musicians". Furthermore, the Sulphur-crested cockatoo named Snowball was the first nonhuman animal scientifically proven to be able to hear a groove and dance along to it, responding to the beat within two or three counts and possessing 14 distinct dance moves.
Finally, technology revealed highly structured communication in the animal world that fits the definition of music, such as the whale song recorded by the US military in the 1950s. These songs were found to be structured hierarchically, made up of units, phrases, themes, songs, and sessions—exactly how humans structure music. Humpback whales became the most successful single pressing artists of all time of any species after their songs were released on an album and published globally, marking a major influence on the world conservation movement. Ultimately, the entire life cycle, from DNA and RNA, which functions as both instruction and material, mirrors the evolution and unfolding logic inherent in music itself.
