Seeing connections between what seem to be unrelated activities such as human speech, jazz, and whale song is fascinating to me and I’m not alone. Scientists at the University of California at Merced (UC Merced) have delivered handily on that premise according to an Oct. 13, 2017 news item on phys.org,
Jazz musicians riffing with each other, humans talking to each other and pods of killer whales all have interactive conversations that are remarkably similar to each other, new research reveals.
Cognitive science researchers at UC Merced have developed a new method for analyzing and comparing the sounds of speech, music and complex animal vocalizations like whale song and bird song. The paper detailing their findings is being published today [Oct. 12, 2017] in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface.
Their method is based on the idea that these sounds are complex because they have multiple layers of structure. Every language, for instance, has individuals sounds, roughly corresponding to letters, that combine to form syllables, words, phrases, sentences and so on. It’s a hierarchy that everyone understands intuitively. Musical compositions have their own temporal hierarchies, but until now there hasn’t been a way to directly compare the hierarchies of speech and music, or test whether similar hierarchies might exist in bird song and whale song.
An Oct. 12, 2017 UC Merced news release by Lorena Anderson, which originated the news item, provides more details about the investigation (Note: Links have been removed),
“Playing jazz music has been likened to a conversation among musicians, and killer whales are highly social creatures who vocalize as if they are talking to each other. But does jazz music really sound like a conversation, and do killer whales really sound like they are talking?” asked lead researcher and UC Merced professor Chris Kello. “We know killer whales are highly social and intelligent, but it’s hard to tell that they are interacting when you listen to recordings of them. Our method shows how much their sound patterns are like people talking, but not like other, less social whales or birds.”
The researchers figured out a way to measure and compare sound recordings by converting them into “barcodes” that capture clusters of sound energy, and clusters of clusters, across levels of a hierarchy. These barcodes allowed the researchers to directly compare temporal hierarchies in more than 200 recordings of different kinds of speech in six different languages, different kinds of popular and classical music, four different species of birds and whales singing their songs, and even thunderstorms.
Kello and his colleagues have been using the barcode method for several years. They first developed it in studies of conversations. The study published today is the first time that they applied the method to music and animal vocalizations.
“The method allows us to ask questions about language and music and animal songs that we couldn’t ask without a way to see and compare patterns in all these recordings,” Kello said.
A common song
The researchers compared barcode-style visualizations of recorded sounds. Credit: UC Merced
Kello, fellow UC Merced cognitive science professor Ramesh Balasubramaniam, graduate student Butovens Me´de´ [or Médé] and collaborator professor Simone Dalla Bella also discovered that the haunting songs of huge humpback whales are remarkably similar to the beautiful songs of tiny nightingales and hermit thrushes in terms of their temporal hierarchies.
“Humpbacks, nightingales and hermit thrushes are solitary singers,” Kello said. “The barcodes show that their songs have similar layers of structure, but we don’t know what it means — yet.”
The idea for this project came from Kello’s sabbatical at the University of Montpellier in France, where he worked and discussed ideas with Dalla Bella. Balasubramaniam, who studies how music is perceived, is in the School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts with Kello, who studies speech and language processing. The project was a natural collaboration and is part of a growing research focus at UC Merced that was enabled by the National Science Foundation-funded CHASE summer school on Music and Language in 2014, and a Google Faculty Award to Kello.
Balasubramaniam is interested in continuing the work to better understand how brains distinguish between music and speech, while Kello said there are many different avenues to pursue.
For instance, the researchers found nearly identical temporal hierarchies for six different languages, which may suggest something universal about human speech. However, because this result was based on recordings of TED Talks — which have a common style and progression — Kello said it will be important to keep looking at other forms of speech and language.
One of his graduate students, Sara Schneider, is using the method to study the convergence of Spanish and English barcodes in bilingual conversations. Another graduate student, Adolfo Ramirez-Aristizabal, is working with Kello and Balasubramaniam to study whether the barcode method may shed light on how brains process speech and other complex sounds.
“Listening to music and speech, we can hear some of what we see in the barcodes, and the information may be useful for automatic classification of audio recordings. But that doesn’t mean that our brains process music and speech using these barcodes,” Kello said. “It’s intriguing, but we need to keep asking questions and go where the data lead us.”
A geneticist and a jazz musician first combined forces for Genes and Jazz at a 2008 Guggenheim museum event where it was first conceptualized (and performed?). Vancouver will be lucky enough to enjoy a live performance on July 17, 2015 as part of the 2015 Indian Summer Festival (July 9 – 18, 2015). Here’s more from the festival event page,
What happens when you cross a Nobel prize-winning geneticist with one of New York’s most sought after jazz quintets? Genes & Jazz. Part jazz concert, part scientific talk by one of the world’s finest scientific minds, Genes & Jazz is where the seemingly dichotomous worlds of science and the arts meet.
Dr. Harold Varmus won the Nobel Prize in 1989 for his work on the proto-oncogene, which enhanced our understanding of cancer. [emphasis mine] His son, jazz trumpeter Jacob leads the Jacob Varmus Quintet. [emphasis mine] Together they explore the ways that genes and notes affect complex organisms and compelling music. The father-son duo compares cell biology to the development of musical compositions.
“Mutation is essential to species diversity just as stylistic variation is essential to the arts,” says Dr. Varmus. “Without genetic error, there would be no evolution. Without variety, there would be no development in art, literature or music. Variety is essential to progress.”
Genes & Jazz was sparked in 2008 as part of the ‘Works & Process’ series at the Guggenheim Museum in New York.
July 17 – July 17 [2015]
Vancouver Playhouse
600 Hamilton Street at Dunsmuir
Vancouver, BC
Admission: $25 / $40 / $60
For anyone wondering about how the jazz might sound, there’s this from the ticket purchase page,
“…lyrical and self-assured, more Miles Davis than Dr. John.” – The New Yorker
I think the first person to link jazz with biology was Dr. Mae-Won Ho in a 2006 Institute of Science in Society (ISIS) lecture: Quantum Jazz; the meaning of life, the universe, and everything (free version). The fully referenced and illustrated lecture is available for members only. Here’s an excerpt from the lecture,
Quantum jazz is the music of the organism dancing life into being, from the top of her head to her toes and fingertips, every single cell, molecule and atom taking part in a remarkable ensemble that spins and sways to rhythms from pico (10-12) seconds to minutes, hours, a day, a month, a year and longer, emitting light and sound waves from atomic dimensions of nanometres up to metres, spanning a musical range of 70 octaves (for that is the range of living activities). And each and every player, the tinniest molecule not withstanding, is improvising spontaneously and freely, yet keeping in tune and in step with the whole.
There is no conductor, no choreographer, the organism is creating and recreating herself afresh with each passing moment.
That’s why ordinary folks like us can walk and chew gum at the same time, why top athletes can run a mile in under four minutes, and kung fu experts can move with lightning speed and perhaps even fly effortlessly through the air, like in the movie Crouching Tiger and Hidden Dragon. This perfect coordination of multiple tasks carried out simultaneously depends on a special state of wholeness or coherence best described as “quantum coherence”, hence quantum jazz.
Quantum coherent action is effortless action, effortless creation, the Taoist ideal of art and poetry, of life itself.
Dr. Ho also gave an interview about her influences and ‘quantum jazz’ which is reproduced in ISIS report 23/06/10 (presumably 23 June 2010),
ATHM [Alternative therapies in health and medicine]: Please tell us a little bit about your background and schooling.
Ho: I was born in Hong Kong; started school in Chinese and then transferred to an English school for girls, run by Italian nuns. I got exposed to serious Western ideas late-ish in life, when I was about 10 or 11 years old. I was quite good in school, and the nuns let me do whatever I liked; didn’t have to listen if I got bored. So I escaped the worst of reductionist Western education because ideas that didn’t fit just rolled off my back. I guess that explains why I’m always at odds with whatever the conventional theory is in every single field that I go into.
I was in the convent school until I entered Hong Kong University to read biology and then biochemistry as a PhD. Again, I learned almost nothing useful during that time. Maybe I exaggerate: I learned, by myself, of things I liked to learn about. After I finished university, I got a postdoctoral fellowship, and began to change fields because I didn’t like the kind of research I was doing. I began to revolt against neo-Darwinism and the reductionist way of looking at things in bits.
I had gone into biochemistry for my Ph.D. because of something I heard from one of the professors who quoted Albert St. Györgyi – the father of biochemistry—that life was interposed between two energy levels of an electron. I thought that was sheer poetry. That made me want to know, “what is life?”
So I went into biochemistry thinking I would find the answer there. But it was very dull because biochemistry then was about cutting up and grinding up everything, separating, purifying. Nothing to tell you about what life is about.
Biology as a whole was studying dead, pinned specimens. There was nothing that answered the question, what is biological organization? What makes organisms tick? What is being alive? I especially detested neo-Darwinism because it was the most mind-numbing theory that purports to explain anything and everything by “selective advantage”, competition and selective advantage.
I spent a lot of time criticizing neo-Darwinism until I got bored. What neo-Darwinism leaves out is the whole of chemistry, physics, and mathematics, all science in fact. You don’t even need any physiology or developmental biology if everything can be explained in terms of selective advantage and a gene for any and every character, real or imaginary.
Finally, I met some remarkable people and learned alot from them, and completely changed my field of research to try and answer that haunting question, “what is life?” I wrote a book on the‘physics of organisms’, not ‘biophysics’, which is largely about the structure of dead biological materials and physical methods used in characterizing them. The physics of organisms is about living organization, quantum coherence and other important concepts.
Varmus and Ho may or may not be familiar with each other’s work linking jazz with biology. It wouldn’t be the first time that two or more people came to similar conclusions without reference to each other. At a guess, I’d say Ho’s approach is more about the poetry or the metaphor while Varmus’ approach is more about the music.
Andrew Maynard has a brief discussion on the new ISO standard nano definitions which were released earlier in September. (The technical specification document (ISO/TS 27687:2008) is the one you want to get if you’re interested in these kinds of things. ) I was particularly intrigued by Maynard’s discussion of the classification scheme (I used to work in libraries and classification schemes and, as a consequence, have a great interest in the topic) where he discusses nano-objects and how this category solves a problem with defining nano particles. He also discusses a new report form the ISO (ISO Technical Report 12885) on health and safety practices relevant to nanotechnology. I’d suggest you check out Maynard’s blog at SafeNano.
Laura Werth a Vancouver jazz singer who I’ve mentioned before has a couple of performances next week. On Thursday, October 30th, she’ll be at the “Toast to Mandela” event at the VanCity Theatre (1181 Seymour St., Vancouver), 6 pm, tickets $50. It’s a fundraiser for “Education without Borders”. She’ll also be appearing at Capones Restauarant and Jazz Club (1141 Hamilton St., Vancouver) on Friday, October 31 and Saturday, Nov. 1, 2008. There’s no cover charge. If you want to hear Laura, try her site.
If you’re interested in video poetry, Heather Haley is hosting “Visible Verse” again this year at Pacific Cinematheque (1131 Howe St., Vancouver). Oops, I had a link here but Cinematheque hasn’t got the 2008 Visible Verse programme and ticket purchasing information on their website yet.
The 2008 Canada Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences started yesterday at the University of British Columbia (UBC) and I’m presenting at one of the conferences. (Btw, their Congress website is not one of my faves.)
My presentation is called, The Nanotech Mysteries: an initiation into the science and the technology. It’s all about the wiki I’m developing on nanotechnology. I’m discussing some of the ideas behind the project and reviewing a prototype for the project. The presentation is for the Canadian Association of Teachers of Technical Writing (CATTW). Their conference website is here. There’s not a lot to it but they do have a programme there. I’m presenting tomorrow, June 1 in the 1:30 to 3 pm slot. I’m listed last on the speaker list, it looks like it’s going to be a nice day, and it’s the session before afternoon coffee. It just seems that I shouldn’t expect a big audience.
On a jazz note, my friend and her band are performing tonight at Bogarts, 6:30 to 9:30 pm at 1619 West Broadway, Vancouver.
I found a rebuttal to that study carbon nanotube could be like asbestos study that’s been published in Nature Nanotechnology. The summaries of the study all said that ‘long’ carbon nanotubes resemble asbestos fibres and, according to this first study, create the same kinds of lesions as asbestos when tested on mice. The rebuttal (found at Small Times), which is based on an interview with the CEO of a company that produces long carbon nanotubes commercially, makes this point: ‘Long’ as defined by the study meant anything over 20 microns and the longest carbon nanotube used in the study was 56 microns. His company, Nanocomp Technologies, produces carbon nanotubes that are millimetre-long. That’s a pretty significant difference in scale which may explain why the CEO described the report as ‘bad science’. The whole thing keeps raising more questions for me i.e. What is the standard length of commercially produced carbon nanotubes? At what point does length have an impact? For example, is there a different impact or no impact if the length is a millimetre-long rather than 56 microns?
A friend of mine is a jazz singer who’s performing tonight (Friday nights through July 2008) at the Fairview Pub, 898 West Broadway, Vancouver, BC. She’s on from 6-9 pm. For a sample, you can listen to her here.
