On February 2, 1920, the opera prima —in its most literal sense of opera— by the Russian composer Igor Stravinsky debuted. A work, The Song of the Nightingale, the composition of which took Stravinsky an effort of 9 years to complete. The opera tells the story of a nightingale who sings happily to the emperor of China, until his Japanese counterpart gives him a mechanical nightingale. The animal, seeing itself displaced by technology, decides to return to nature, while people stay enjoying the ingenious artifact .
In the work, the difference between the real, cheerful, rich, fluid and variant nightingale, as opposed to the mechanical bird, which sounds regular, repetitive, almost robotic, is clearly heard. The songs of the birds are, indeed, rich in nuances, changing and alive . But how do birds make such beautiful and inspiring sounds? The vocalists of the opera achieve their singing by modulating the air with the vocal cords, muscular bands that humans have at the entrance to the trachea. But birds don’t have vocal cords , so they need other anatomical structures to produce such richly flexed and modulated sounds.
To be able to do this, birds have an organ at the base of the trachea, which is called the syrinx , in honor of the mythological nymph Syringa, whose body, transformed into reeds, was used by the god Pan to make his homonymous flute. The syrinx has flexible walls, to the point that in some species of birds it can swell as if it were a balloon. This flexibility allows it to emit vibrations as air passes through it, producing sounds. This organ is located right where the trachea forks into the bronchi, so some birds can even modulate the walls of each of the branches differently, thus producing several different sounds at the same time. Some lucky species manage to imitate sounds of other animals, and even artificial words and sounds. And although in the case of the nightingale, this capacity has not been developed, they do present an enviable variability of songs.
The song of the nightingale, like that of many other birds, is directly related to sexual selection through the choice of females, so it has a social function. Thus, the songs of the nightingales and the interaction that occurs between them have consequences for the population. Each nightingale has its own repertoire of three to five songs, which can change over time. Songs that they memorize, and sometimes produce by themselves. The order in which they sing them can change, regardless of the order in which they learned it.
Within the social function, it is worth highlighting a form of competition within the species. Each male specimen takes the songs it sings as its own, and is reluctant to imitate the songs of those close neighbors, who will be competitors when it comes to reproducing. In addition, it also competes in volume and rhythm, striving to be the most listened to neighbor. So much so that when a nightingale already has experience in competing with others, it presents a more constant competitive attitude, even when it is no longer in that situation. However, with those more distant neighbors, who are still within earshot but are distant enough not to be direct competitors, they come to share a repertoire.
Another problem that nightingales face when singing is that they are not the only ones to do so. There is also competition with other bird species. Especially if there are many singing species in the environment, the sound of songs overlapping one another can mask the song of a lone male nightingale desperately searching for a female to mate with. To solve this problem, the nightingales listen to the songs of other species, and wait patiently for silences to occur, a moment that they take advantage of to sing their trill themselves.
For us humans, the song of the nightingales is really attractive; its vivid nature has been an inspiration for many artists, who invoke with it the beauty of nature, whether through the admiration of the emperor of China, or the desire to hear a nightingale singing in London’s Berkeley Square. But the truth is that it is increasingly difficult to listen to nightingales, especially in big cities, where we have replaced their song with those ingenious devices that we gladly carry around and that chirp at us with synthetic sounds when someone tweets at us ( from English to tweet, piar).
In Stravinsky’s play, the emperor of China, sad to lose the nightingale, falls ill and faces death. But the bird returns and sings to death, convincing it to let him live. When the courtiers return, they see the emperor perfectly healthy, although the nightingale has left again. Perhaps we could get a reading of that work; It is not bad that we enjoy our gadgets, which undoubtedly make our lives easier, as long as we do not forget that we are still animals and, after all, we depend on that metaphorical nightingale, which is nature, continuing to sing for us.
References:
Brumm, H. (2006) ‘Signalling through acoustic windows: nightingales avoid interspecific competition by short-term adjustment of song timing’, Journal of Comparative Physiology A, 192(12), pp. 1279–1285. doi:10.1007/s00359-006-0158-x.
Hultsch, H. and Todt, D. (1981) ‘Repertoire sharing and song-post distance in nightingales (Luscinia megarhynchos B.)’, Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology, 8(3), pp. 183–188. doi:10.1007/BF00299828.
Hultsch, H. and Todt, D. (1989) ‘Memorization and reproduction of songs in nightingales (Luscinia megarhynchos): evidence for package formation’, Journal of Comparative Physiology A, 165(2), pp. 197–203. doi:10.1007/BF00619194.
Naguib, M. (1999) ‘Effects of song overlapping and alternating on nocturnally singing nightingales’, Animal Behaviour, 58(5), pp. 1061–1067. doi:10.1006/anbe.1999.1223.
