Bug Music: How Insects Gave Us Rhythm and Noise – David Rothenberg

Thoughts: I didn’t find this book’s thesis—that insect noises were a significant impetus and inspiration for musical expression, if I’m recalling it correctly—to be persuasively argued. In any case, Rothenberg’s enthusiasm about insect sounds shines through on every page.

(The notes below are not a summary of the book, but rather raw notes - whatever I thought, at the time, might be worth remembering. Further, these notes are a more-or-less direct transcription of notes I wrote in a notebook years ago - I don’t fully understand why I wrote down some of the things I did, but presumably past Jacob thought present/future Jacob might benefit from tracking down and following up on some of the things mentioned.)

Rothenberg, David. 2013. Bug Music: How Insects Gave Us Rhythm and Noise. Picador.

• 9: “Keith Kevan, [past] director of the Lyman Entomological Museum at McGill… compiled and self-published five 300-page volumes of every reference to singing insects he could find”
  • “Land of the Locusts”
• 11: “…we have always intuitively known that the sonic declarations of animals make much more sense to us humans if we consider them to be music rather than language.”
• 15: “Inside all that noise [of cicadas, Homer] must have heard the potential for beauty, as a wash of sound contains all perceptible sounds, as a solid block of marble contains all sculptures that can be honed out of it.”
• 63: “[Lars] Fredrikson has released two albums of his cricket orchestra, Tingqiuxuan Presents… and Listening to Autumn”
• 81: Bernie Krause’s idea that “each creature has its proper sound that fits into an acoustic niche, a bit like an ecological niche.”
• 86: Curtis Roads’s book Microsound (2001) - granular synthesis
• 88: “…La Monte Young’s Theatre of Eternal Music or Jem Finer’s Longplayer… as part of Brian Eno’s and Steward Brand’s Clock of the Long Now.”
• 88: 1910 Ezra Pound’s ideas of the Great Bass… cf. Adam Neely’s talk about harmony and rhythm
  • j: idea: composition with a tempo that correspond’s to the piece’s key, down many octaves.
• 96: Mark Changizi… book called Harnessed in 2011 ~ argues human music based on human movement
• 108: Do we, like crickets, follow simple mathematical rules ar we listen/entrain? “Martin Clayton, Rebecca Sage & Udo Will wrote a massive article investigating whether this idea has any place in… musicology” + many responses from smart people in different fields (European Meetings in Ethnomusicology, 11, 2005)
• 113: James Gleick’s study of the history of information: The Information (NY: Pantheon, 2011)
• 126: >= 200,000 species of insect use vibrational communication
• 130: David Dunn: “if I am doing a concert, I sometimes ask the audience to suspend their expectation of what music is - listen to this as… you would to a swamp or a forest.”
• 133: Sounds made by pinyon engraver beetles -> hour-long piece called The Sound of Light in Trees: Earth Ear Records, 2006
• 135: David Dunn: “…one of the most important rules for artists in forging and new collaborative relation with Science: science fiction that might lead to science fact.”
• 135: “of all soundscape composers, David Dunn is among the most possessed by speculative wonder.”
• 144: Recording with hydrophone: Tom Lawrence’s Water Beetles of Pollardstown Fen, Gruenrekorder 2011
• 145: Scientists at Clarkson U recording the vibrations of molecules in living and dead insects. Author provides no citation… :(
• 148: Pieces of music about insects: Josquin’s El Grillo,
• 151: Bela Bartok’s “The Night’s Music” - Out of Doors: IV (1926)
• 155: recordings of Pygmies by Louis Sarno
• 158: Bernie Krause’s recordings such as Into a Wild Sanctuary; The Great Animal Orchestra
• 161: Recordings of insects after Indonesian gamelan performances: significantly more synchronized after than before
• 167: Pierre Schaeffer: Treatise on Musical Objects
• 170: Mira Calix’s Nuna: Insects recorded and sampled with symphony orchestra
• 181: Freeware synthesizer emulator, Automat, by Stefan Kirch. Good source of unexpected sounds
• 183: Synth plugin, Zebra, developed by Urs Heckmann
• 189: David Hykes’s Harmonic Choir - “pioneered Central Asian throat-singing as an American Art.”
• 199: Michael Tenzer’s Analytical Studies in World Music
• 201: Robert Henke (creator of Ableton Live) “created a tool called Granulator” - designed for making textures
• 243-: “For Further Reading”:
  • on the significance of insects in culture:
    • Jean-Henri Fabre’s The Life of a Grasshopper [1891]
    • Vincent Dethier’s Crickets and Katydids [1992]
    • Jussi Parikka’s Insect Media: An Archaeology of Animals & Technology (2010)
  • Steven Strogatz’s Sync (2003)
  • John Himmelman’s Cricket Radio: Tuning in the Night-Singing Insects (2011)
  • Curtis Roads’s Microsound (2004)
  • Marta Ulvaeus’s The Book of Music and Nature (2001)
  • Salomé Voegelin’s Listening to Noise & Silence (2010)
  • Joseph Nechvatal’s Immersion Into Noise (2011)
  • Joanna Demers’s Listening Through the Noise: The Aesthetics of Experimental Electronic Music (2010)