Bernie,
That was a magnificent article! (And I apologize for the delay in my
response to my own post. I have had a cold bug of some sort.) You
put it all into words perfectly for me and I appreciate the link. I
was esp. fascinated by the sound graphs and how certain species
occupy their own level of the sound environment.
Thanks again!
----------------------
Suzanne
http://web.tampabay.rr.com/swilli41/www
Florida, USA
"What hath God wrought!" - First Morse code message from Washington
D.C. to Baltimore, May 1844
--- In Bernie Krause <>
wrote:
>
> See http://www.wildsanctuary.com/niche.pdf ("The Niche Hypothesis:
> How Animals Taught us to Dance and Sing") first published in 1987.
>
> The idea of bird dialects was studied and published for years
before
> the ones below came to light, mostly through the work of the late
> Luis Baptista, Director of the Dept of Birds & Mammals at the
> California Academy of Sciences, the department with which I was
> affiliated during and immediately after my doctoral work in the
late
> 70s/early 80s. Baptista's main subject was the White-crowned
Sparrow
> (Zonotrichia leucophrys). He trained many sets of young birds to
> learn songs of other species as well as to alter the dialects of
> other White-crowns whose offspring they were.
>
> Although he never got around to publishing his findings, he was
> coming to the realization, just before his untimely death a few
years
> ago, that one of the contributing factors of the syntax may well
have
> been the Soundscape Niche Effect, or the complex ways in which the
> soundscape of each White-crown flock affected their ability to
learn
> their songs so that they would be effective within the acoustic
turf
> they had chosen to live. The special combination of the biophony,
> geophony, and anthrophony, in each White-crowned environment, had,
> after all, a likely and unique effect on how the song syntax
> developed.
>
> The idea that humans learned to dance, sing and drum from the
> biophonies and geophonies of the natural world had also been around
> for a while before I got to it (See Chapter 12 of the late Paul
> Shepard's "The Others: How Animals Made us Human"), although not
> fully developed into a thesis. Shepard's work is supported by the
> parallel anthropological efforts of Louis Sarno, who has lived and
> worked with the Ba'Aka Pygmies in a remote forest of the Central
> African Republic, and Steven Feld, who worked closely with the
Kaluli
> of Papua New Guinea and who is now recording and studying a
different
> angle in Ghana. And, of course, the idea had been around for eons
> before academics in the West wrapped their territorial minds
around
> the concept and gave it credence. It was, after all, practiced by
> those human groups living much more closely connected to the
natural
> world.
>
> Bernie Krause
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