Over the past few decades, spectrograms have become a powerful tool for representing and analyzing animal vocalizations. In the case of birdsong, spectrograms have joined a number of techniques historically used to represent the sounds of birds, including translation into linguistic syllables and musical notation. As with any technique of representation, however, spectrograms capture only certain aspects of birdsong as a total phenomenon, affording particular interpretations that privilege the sonic signal over its broader ecological significance. This paper explores current resources for analyzing birdsong and differentiates between structure and form in order to accommodate affective and aesthetic responses to animal voices.
Holly Watkins is the Minehan Family Professor of Musicology at the Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester (New York). She is the author of Musical Vitalities: Ventures in a Biotic Aesthetics of Music (Chicago, 2018) and Metaphors of Depth in German Musical Thought: From E. T. A. Hoffmann to Arnold Schoenberg (Cambridge, 2011). She has published articles on Romantic and modernist aesthetics, music and ecology, and intersections between music and philosophy in such venues as the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Nineteenth-Century Music, New Literary History,Women and Music, Opera Quarterly, and Contemporary Music Review. In 2010-11, Watkins held a Harrington Faculty Fellowship at The University of Texas at Austin, and in 2014-15, she received a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies to support work on Musical Vitalities. She currently divides her time between teaching, musicological work, and intensive land stewardship and vegetable gardening.
