Sounds of Science

Since ancient times, poets, philosophers, and scientists have spoken of the music of the spheres. Johannes Kepler, in the 16th century, expressed this idea by suggesting that the movement of the planets around the Sun could be translated into sound. I'm Jim Metzner, and these are the sounds of science. Kepler challenged the musicians of his time to set his data to music. It took 375 years and the advent of computers and synthesizers to meet that challenge directly. The man responsible in part for the realization of Kepler's harmony of the world was Willie Ruff, a professor of music at Yale University's School of Music. Kepler's real contribution was that he took a preoccupation of his, which was music. And by trying to explain through musical organization how the great creator had created the heavens, he stumbled on three of the landmark laws of astronomy. Kepler's first law was that planets do not move in perfect circles, but that they move

in an elliptical orbit, and that they are constantly changing their speeds. Each of these sounds represents the movements of the planet in orbit. The higher the tone, the faster the planet's angular velocity around the Sun. If you hear a tone raise and lower in pitch, it means that the planet is indeed speeding up and slowing down in its elliptical orbit. We hear more about Kepler's harmony of the world in an ex-program. The sounds of science are presented by DuPont, a broadly diversified company dedicated to discovery through science and engineering. I'm Jim Metzner. We're listening to a picture in sound of our solar system.

I'm Jim Metzner, and these are the sounds of science. You are simply to assume that you are sitting on the Sun, that you are in the center of the solar system, and that these planets are moving around you. Willie Ruff is a professor of music at Yale University School of Music, inspired by the ideas of 16th century scientists Johannes Kepler, professor Ruff and colleague John Rogers, gathered astronomical data for the motion of the planets around the Sun. With the help of a computer and synthesizer, they transpose the planetary velocities into audible frequencies. What these sounds represent for me is an oral planetarium. The highest of the sounds is that of Mercury, the lowest is that of Pluto. Kepler said that this was a constantly changing symphony, not ever repeating itself, and

it is true that he was right about that, because at no two points in time, will the planets be exactly in the same place again and doing the same thing? Music was the clearest metaphor for Kepler to use, because the scale of the whole planetary system, as he knew it, could be embodied in the pitch relationships that we live with as music. Our thanks to Willie Ruff, the sounds of science are presented by DuPont, a broadly diversified company dedicated to discovery through science and engineering. I'm Jim Metzner. Total air once wrote that music fathoms the sky. I'm Jim Metzner, and these are the sounds of science. We're listening to music, which attempts to fathom the solar system by representing the

movement of planets orbiting the Sun. Willie Ruff is a professor of music at Yale University's School of Music. Inspired by the ideas of 16th century scientists Johannes Kepler, Professor Ruff has created a planetarium for the ears. Each tone we're hearing represents a different planet, and changes in pitch indicate variations in the planet's speed and the shape of its orbit. So he's a brief audio tour of our solar system, beginning with a planet closest to the Sun. What you're hearing now is the sound of Mercury, and then Mercury will be joined by Venus. There is Venus, and Venus's pitch doesn't vary very much. It's almost constant, because Venus's orbit is almost circular, and the next sound will be that of Earth. Earth's orbit is also nearly circular, and it only varies by a half tone. There it is.

And the next planet to enter will be Mars and the Tenorange. The large planet Jupiter will enter next, it's in the baritone area. The Saturn will enter next, in the base, and then we'll hear a Neptune. In this clip of Neptune, then we'll be joined by a slower clip of Uranus. These eight then will finally be joined by the lone, cupping sound of a bass drum of Pluto. Thanks to Willie Roth, the sounds of science are presented by DuPont, a broadly diversified company dedicated to discovery through science and engineering. I'm Jim Metzner. The noisy screen is given most often to higher ranking animals in the dominant hierarchy, and it's frequently accompanied by physical contact between them.

If you were a Reese's monkey and you get into trouble, you'd better know your place in the social register. I'm Jim Metzner, and these are the sounds of science. Reese's monkeys are very social, but highly squabbly animals, and much of their fighting is settled on the basis of a dominant hierarchy. This dominant hierarchy is not determined by who's bigger or who's stronger. It's based really on social factors and kinship. Harold and Sally Gazuelis are on the faculty of Yerke's primate center in Emory University. They discovered that when a Reese's monkey gets into a squabble with another Reese's monkey, its call for help contains several levels of information. Palt screens are generally given to relatives, kin, within the group. The calls communicate something about the situation that the call or find themselves in, so it's not just help I need aid, it's help I need aid against so-and-so in the group,

and help I need aid because I'm being bitten or slapped rather than I'm just being threatened without any physical contact. So they actually convey a lot of very specific information about the situation that the call or is in. The fact that the communication system of Reese's monkeys is far more complex than we previously thought is very exciting. Reese opens a lot of new doors in terms of what features of their social and physical environment matter to them. Our thanks to Harold and Sally Gazuelis, the sounds of science are presented by DuPont, a broadly diversified company dedicated to discovery through science and engineering. I'm Jim Messner. They are very scrappy animals, they test each other, have fights and scream a lot, although they don't normally do each other a lot of injury during these fights. Reese's monkeys, when they do fight, often call to one another for help.

The study of these calls for aid has revealed some of the richness and complexity of animal communication. I'm Jim Messner and these are the sounds of science. Total screams are given both to relatives and also to higher ranking animals. Sally and Harold Gazuelis are on the faculty of the Yerkees Climate Center at Emily University. Whether or not an animal aids depends greatly upon the type of scream that's given because the different screams signify different kinds of aggressive encounters, some are more serious because of potential physical aggression, some are serious because their challenge is to the dominant hierarchy and some just aren't very serious at all. The scream that you hear now is an arch scream and the caller is usually a juvenile monkey giving a call to an older monkey who ranks below its mother in the dominant hierarchy. This is an undulating scream.

It's given to higher ranking opponents in the dominant hierarchy. It's almost always given by an adult female as this caller is. Although we're hesitant to say that these calls are even a precursive equivalent to language, it nevertheless, these results imply that there are precursors to language in our non-human primate ancestors. Our thanks to Harold and Sally Gazuelis, the sounds of science are presented by DuPont, a broadly diversified company dedicated to discovery through science and engineering. I'm Jim Metzner. Anyone who has had contact with well-trained animals probably wondered about the depth of its intelligence. I'm Jim Metzner and these are the sounds of science. Can you tell me what's here? What? Good boy. That's right. That's your wood.

Good parrot. What we're trying to do is to examine the actual cognitive and vocal abilities of an African-Grey parrot. What kinds of concepts can he master? How can he view the world? What types of experiments can we design to help us understand his behavior? Dr. Irene Pepperberg is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at Northwest in University. He's been training a parrot named Alex and the results have been, to say the least, surprising. What? But you can't tell me how many would. Now look and tell me how many. How? What? Good boy. That's right. You looked at what I was showing you. Everybody knows that parrots can mimic human sounds. Most of the time people assume that these birds have no concept of what it is that these sounds represent. What we've been able to show is that through the appropriate training procedures, we can train the bird to use these vocalizations in what we call a referential manner. That is in a contextually applicable manner that makes the labels and the objects correspond to one another. Well, tell me what's here. What is it?

Shawa. That's right. Good birdie. Do you want shower? No, okay. No more shower. Alex can produce the labels for 30 different objects and he can combine his labels to identify entirely novel combinations of objects. So for example, if he is trained to identify a green wood and a blue key, if you show him a green key for the first time, he will be able to identify that correctly. What's different? Color. That's a good parrot. So the same shade, same matter, and different color. Good. Why? Thanks to Irene Pepperberg, the sounds of science are presented by DuPont, a broadly diversified company dedicated to discovery through science and engineering. I'm Jim Metzner. Not? Okay. You can have enough. Parrots, as everyone knows, can be trained to mimic human speech, but do they have the ability to understand and use that speech in a way that makes sense? I'm Jim Metzner, and these are the sounds of science. What do you want?

I want you to identify this. What is it? Rock. Good parrot. You're right. It's a rock. Good birdie. Good boy. Yeah. Why not? Okay. You can have a cut. Dr. Irene Pepperberg is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at Northwestern University. She's been training a parrot named Alex, and apparently Alex knows how to do a lot more than just ask for crackers. Can you tell me what's here? What's here? What? Good boy. What we're trying to do is to have Alex identify certain objects in the laboratory. And produce the human vocalization that corresponds to the label for that object. You can play with the wood. You identified it. Here. Can you tell me how many? How many? What we're doing here is demonstrating the fact that he can recognize quantities of objects. His accuracy is approximately 80% over the course of several years that we've done this type of work.

How many? Right. Okay. You're right. Three. Good. Good. Alex has a communication system, and that is very different from what we call a human language, but it is a significant ability. He can influence certain of his trainer's behaviors and influence his environment by use of this interesting communication code that we have taught him that uses certain elements of human language. I want you to tell me what this is. What is it? Yeah. It's yummy. Oh, thanks to Irene Pepperberg, the sounds of science are presented by DuPont, a broadly diversified company dedicated to discovery through science and engineering. I'm Jim Metzner. What do you want? I want you to tell me what this is. That was the sound of a starling that is trying to sing the song Dixie, that he has heard whistle to him by the humans that he lives with.

That starling isn't just whistling, Dixie, it might be giving us clues as to how humans learn to speak. I'm Jim Metzner, and these are the sounds of science. This starling was found by someone as a nestling and fallen out of a tree and we agreed to raise it. And so it lived with humans instead of living with other starlings. And as a result, it incorporated the vocalizations it heard in its environment, and those vocalizations were those of humans, not those of other starlings. The starling is called Rex. Its surrogate mother is Dr. Meredith West, an associate professor of psychology at DuPont University. It's just no character, it's a face tree, like character, precision. That was what we call jargate, a collection of sounds that Rex had overheard. And one of the things that Rex did was that he took bits and pieces out of conversation and then recreated them into other sentence forms. And that's something that people think that a human instrument does.

Before it can really speak many words very articulately, it can give off very long strings of utterances that sound very much like human conversation, but like human conversation in a language that you don't quite know all the words. And that's exactly what Rex was doing. Well, if you more about Rex in the next program, our thanks to Dr. Meredith West, the sounds of science are presented by DuPont, a broadly diversified company dedicated to discovery through science and engineering. I'm Jim Metzner. We're listening to Rex, a stalling that imitates human speech and the sounds of his household environment. He's giving scientists a bird's ear view of the value of mimicry. I'm Jim Metzner, and these are the sounds of science. When the tiny was five days old, Rex's surrogate mother has been Dr. Meredith West, an associate

professor of psychology at Duke University. If you listen very carefully to what Rex is saying there, he proceeds a lot of the vocalizations by the sound of someone sniffing. The reason he's making that sound is because my husband suffers from respiratory ailment the entire time he's working with them and often sniffed when he was around them and one of the things that Rex very clearly associated with, my husband was the sniffing. He also imitated the sounds of the creek and the squeak of our back door opening and closing. An important sound to Rex because it meant that somebody was coming to visit him. The value in the research is it's an animal model is a role of social interaction and language learning. We learn to talk because they hear people talking and because they need to talk in order to interact with people. The reason that this Starling learned to imitate was to learn to interact with us.

In our research with Starlings, we documented that Starlings that could overhear human speech and that they lived in homes with humans. But did not have any particular bond with any human, did not learn to imitate human speech. Only Starlings that had a particular bond with a human learned to imitate it. Our thanks to Dr. Meredith West, the sounds of science are presented by DuPont, a broadly diversified company dedicated to discover through science and engineering. I'm Jim Metzner. In 1791, a traveler to the southeastern United States described his first sighting of an alligator as follows. Waters like a cataract is sent from his opening jaws. Clouds of smoke issue from his nostrils.

The earth trembles with his thunder. I'm Jim Metzner and these are the sounds of science. That roar contrasts up visions of angry dragons, but it's likely to be an important signal in the alligator's social life. Seeing us about it is Mike Godwin, who runs the world's largest alligator farm in Kissimmee, Florida. Actually, it's thought to be a mating call, it's called a bellow, and it sounds a lot like rolling thunder or a loud motorcycle being started out. Normally, you hear that sound in the springtime, however, I've known captive alligators to do that all year round. So whether or not it's just for the mating season or not, it's anybody's guess. Alligators are a very vocal type of a reptile, and they can grunt hits and snort amongst themselves all the time. The hissing sound that you're hearing is basically thought to be the crocodilians warning

signal. They make that type of a noise and they really feel agitated normally by human presence. We'll hear about the vocalizations of young alligators in our next program, our thanks to Mike Godwin. The sounds of science are presented by DuPont, a broadly diversified company dedicated to discovery through science and engineering. I'm Jim Metzner. In Louisiana, they say that once upon a time, alligators could whistle, talk, and bark just like a dog. The alligator, according to the legend, lent his tongue to a dog who never gave it back. I'm Jim Metzner, and these are the sounds of science. They may not whistle or talk, but at an early age, alligators rely on sound.

Well, what you're listening to is the running sound from very young alligators, and they make this sound when they hatch. Frank Godwin runs the world's largest alligator farm in Kassimmi, Florida. The female builds her nest around a garden pool area, which is adjacent to water. And she guards that nest. She stays around the nest for the duration. She has to, because the eggs, of course, are buried inside the nest. The only way the babies can get out is for the mother of the diggermouth. Of course, they're covered up in a nest made of vegetation and mud and sticks, and they're trapped in that nest. So, when they hatch out of the egg, they make this running noise to alert their mother to come to law and to dig them out of the nest. From that point, they make her way to the water. This is a defensive sound for the baby alligators. They're the only ones that make this sound.

Once they become adults, you don't hear this sound from this defensive sound in the fact that if they get in trouble, they start this running noise. And the mother alligator, if she's still around at that time, can come kind of protect them. You're hunting alligators. That's the sound that you can make them out. They'll pick their heads up out of the water and actually come to you even. All right, thanks to find Godwin. The sounds of science are presented by DuPont, a broadly diversified company, dedicated to discovery through science and engineering. I'm Jim Metzner. In 1702, Jeremy Collier, writing about the violin in an essay on music, asked, what can be more strange than that the rubbing of a little hair and cat cut together should make such a mighty alteration in a man that sits at a distance? The answer to his question may lie in the transformation of the violin to an electronic instrument.

Jim Metzner and these are the sounds of science. Max Matthews is former director of acoustical and behavioral research at Bell Labs. One of the most important parts of a normal violin is the body. And the body has what are called resonances. That means modes of vibration. If you tap on the body, you can hear these, it gives a hollow sound. And these resonances reinforce the vibration of the string at the particular frequencies of the resonance of the body. The electronic violin doesn't have any body, and consequently doesn't have any body resonances, but instead it has electric circuits, which do exactly the same thing. They are electrical resonances that vibrate, and electrical resonances are very well understood

and very easy to tune, to adjust so that it was possible to, with a screwdriver, literally, adjust the resonances of the electronic violin to get the best tone. The music we've been listening to is performed by Janush Nagaji on an electric violin designed and built by Max Matthews. The sounds of science are presented by Tupont, a broadly diversified company dedicated to discovery through science and engineering. I'm Jim Metzner. We're listening to an electronic instrument which can duplicate and modify the sound of a violin. I'm Jim Metzner, and these are the sounds of science.

Max Matthews is former director of acoustical and behavioral research at Dell Labs. In this instrument, the action of the bow and the string is the same as in the normal violin. Moving the bow across the string causes the string to vibrate, but instead of sending this vibration through a bridge into a body, a small electric pickup is installed in the bridge, and the vibration of the string is converted to an electric current by this pickup. The current goes through a wire to a set of electronics that contains the resonances. The electronic violin doesn't have any body resonances, but instead it has electric circuits which do exactly the same thing. The current goes through these resonances, gets modified, gets its sound quality enhanced, and then goes into an amplifier, and the actual sound comes out a small loudspeaker.

The reason the violin sounds different is that it's really being used as a device to control a sound synthesizer. The music we've been listening to is performed by Yanushinagaji on an electric violin designed and built by Max Matthews. The sounds of science are presented by DuPont, a broadly diversified company dedicated to discovery through science and engineering. We're listening to a musical zipper, and even though it may sound like a hopeless jumble of notes at first, in a moment when we open the zipper, you'll recognize its parts. I'm Jim Metzner, and these are the sounds of science. Michael Kobovi is a professor in the Department of Psychology at Rutgers University.

You're listening to two very well-known melodies. You can't recognize them because we're playing one note from one, and one note from the other in alternation. One name for this way of mixing tunes is musical zipper, although the technical name for it is interleaved melodies. At first you'll be hearing the musical zipper when it is closed, that's when you can't tell which note is which. Together these two tunes form an unfamiliar tune, because they're played at about the same pitch, they form a single auditory stream. Gradually, as the piece goes on, we'll be opening the musical zipper, we'll be raising the pitch of the notes of one melody without changing the notes of the other. One melody will emerge, and you'll recognize it. The other melody will at first sound like a nondescript background, but gradually it too can be heard as a familiar tune. While you're more about musical zippers and auditory streaming in our next program,

our thanks to Michael Kobovi. The sounds of science are presented by DuPont, a broadly diversified company, dedicated to discovery through science and engineering. I'm Jim Metzner. We're listening to two well-known melodies that are blended together to form an auditory stream. I'm Jim Metzner, and these are the sounds of science. As the pitch of the second melody is raised, it becomes recognizable, and we begin to hear two auditory streams. Michael Kobovi is a professor in the Department of Psychology at Rutgers University. He's been studying the phenomenon of streaming. One of the major problems in auditory perception is understanding how the auditory system can separate the jumble of sound pressures that the ear receives into coherent sources,

so that if you're at a cocktail party, how is it that you can hear the sound of the voice of the person you're talking to and not be distracted by the voices of other people around you? The auditory system has a number of mechanisms to allow you to segregate one voice from another, one source from another, and auditory streaming is one example of that kind of mechanism. This is an example of auditory streaming. You hear a high-pitched tone and low-pitched tones. They both form separate streams, and gradually we're bringing together the separate streams by changing the pitch of the high-pitched tone, and when that happens, you don't hear two streams anymore, you hear just one, and it sounds like a gallop. Our thanks to Michael Kobovi, the sounds of science are presented by DuPont, a broadly

diversified company dedicated to discovery through science and engineering. I'm Jim Metzner. In the story of the Pied Piper of Hamlin, scores of rats were lured by the call of a flute, while it turns out that rats may indeed be seduced by certain high-frequency sounds. I'm Jim Metzner, and these are the sounds of science. This is a recording of a male rat calling to a female in a cage. A male is attempting to mate with a female, and these calls occur prior to mating attempts. Dr. Ronald Barthio is a professor of biological sciences at Rutgers University. He's been studying the role of vocalizations in the mating behavior of rats. The calls could not be heard by the human ear, as they are in the range of 50 kHz, but

we've slowed them down in their playback so they become audible. We have found in our experiments that these calls stimulate the female to exhibit enhanced mating activity on her part. Thus they contribute to a two-way conversation that goes on between the male and the female and helps to coordinate their mating activity. These calls are quite complex and variable in their nature. They, in general, consist of a whistle at about 50 kHz, sometimes followed by this warbling sound in rapid frequency shifts that you may hear in the background. Thanks to Ronald Barthio, the sounds of science are presented by DuPont, a broadly diversified company dedicated to discovering through science and engineering.

I'm Jim Metzner. In his poem, The Pied Piper of Hamlin, Robert Browning described the sounds of rats as shrieking and squeaking in 50 different sharps and flats. Rats do vocalize in very high frequency sounds, apparently it's a form of communication. I'm Jim Metzner and these are the sounds of science. As can be heard when these calls are played back at slow speed, they sound sometimes almost like bird calls. Dr. Ronald Barthio is a professor of biological sciences at Rutgers University. He's found that vocalizations are a crucial element in the behavior of rats. Rats have a limited vocal repertoire, but they seem to use their calls in different ways according to the context in which they occur.

For example, the 22 kilohertz call may signify defeat in one context and in another it may warn intruding males to keep away from the area in which the resident male is mating. Rats and other rodents also emit ultrasounds. When taken from the nest or if disturbed or cold, the babies begin emitting a plaintiff whistling call as you hear here. The mother rat hearing the calls of her infants will run to them and retrieve them to the nest. So the call is a very strong signal to the mother to initiate maternal care. Our thanks to Ronald Barfield, the sounds of science are presented by DuPont, a broadly diversified company dedicated to discovery through science and engineering.

I'm Jim Metzner. Every spring owners of houseboats, mord and sawsalito california, have reported hearing strange humming noises at odd hours of the night. I'm Jim Metzner and these are the sounds of science. The source of this sound was still a mystery when acquisition Frank Hubeck began his investigation. When you hear the sound, it is apparently a fan or a motor or a pump. So naturally one thinks that you should look for mechanical equipment, look on land, look on a boat when we found that it was not attached to either of those but out in the middle of nowhere, we said perhaps it isn't a piece of mechanical equipment. We had at different points in time made recordings and found that the frequencies were different. That's one of the things that gave us a clue because everyone reads on their electrical

equipment that they buy 110 volts, 60 cycles, well pumps and such, run up multiples there of. You would expect it to be maybe 60 hertz or 120 hertz. This was not the case, it was 108, on one day, the next day it would be 112. This pointed towards it being something other than mechanical equipment. The culprit it turns out was not an electric motor but a fish. They're commonly known as the California singing fish or the toad fish. The way they produce the sound is by vibrating the muscles around their swim bladder. And their swim bladder is their buoyancy device just as a diver would have to have a buoyancy device so that they could descend lower into the water. All fish have this and they just vibrate their muscles on it. Our thanks to Frank Hubeck. The sounds of science are presented by DuPont, a broadly diversified company dedicated to discovery through science and engineering.

I'm Jim Metzner. Thomas Carlisle once wrote, see deep enough and you see musically. The heart of nature being everywhere music if you can only reach it. I'm Jim Metzner and these are the sounds of science. For me these are biological synthesizers. I at one time wanted to build my own synthesizing equipment and at the time I also kept a lot of fish and worked at public aquariums for many years. And when I discovered these fish it was the perfect synthesis for me where I could combine electronic music and fish to produce a new form of electronic music. Mark Ferguson put an electrode into an aquarium full of knife fish and was able to amplify the fish's weak electric signal. I'm monitoring the signals made by different species of fish. He was able to produce a kind of free form of music of the deep.

The sound for hearing now are some spike tail knife fish that have been mixed together to create a base harmony. These would be in separate tanks and I would just have an electrode in each tank going to a mixing board and then combining it onto a final track. This is just two spike tail knife fish that happen to be a perfect fifth of the part. Since they don't follow a box well tempered scale often times you can get notes which don't correspond exactly to the musical scale and so you get intervals produced that are unusual. Mark Ferguson and senior aquarist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium will hear more about his unique biological synthesizer in our next program. The sounds of science are presented by DuPont, a broadly diversified company dedicated to discovery through science and engineering.

I'm Jim Metzner. Most of us are familiar with electric eels but there are also fish which produce pulses of electricity. I'm Jim Metzner and these are the sounds of science. I can hear some deep notes that would be spike tail knife fish. I can hear some medium tones that would be glass knife fish, a buzzing that's coming into it right now which would be a caropo knife fish. Mark Ferguson is senior aquarist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. He's been using electrodes and amplification to monitor these signals from knife fish and other species. They use a process that we have in our own body where muscle tissue and nerve tissue produce electric discharges and they're working. These fish have modified nerve and muscle tissue groups in their body where they stack these cells one on another to produce a larger voltage. They live in murky water and they use it as a sense, a major sense for them where they

can see in back of them and all around them in fact up to maybe about a foot around them and they communicate with each other over a distance 10 times greater. Most of the day they have just a constant tone but around sunset sunrise and sometimes at night when they react to each other socially they start modifying the sound and chirping to each other and doing frequency rises and you're hearing some of this in the background. Our thanks to Mark Ferguson. The sounds of science are presented by DuPont, a broadly diversified company dedicated to discovery through science and engineering. I'm Jim Metzner. These are the sounds of science.

You can talk about science or you can listen to it. In the sounds of science we do both and there is the chain reaction developing. It started out like a simple drop of water and now we have basically a rainstorm. I'm Jim Metzner, your host for a daily sound portrait of the world of science. Join me for the sounds of science weekdays on the station.