Musicians are fascinated with the possibility that music may be found in nature; it makes our own desire for art seem all the more essential. Over the past few years no less a bold musical explorer than Peter Gabriel has been getting involved. At the Research Center in Atlanta, Georgia, he has been music together with Kanzi, one of the bonobo apes (倭黑猩猩) involved in the long-term language acquisition studies of Sue and Duane Savage-Rumbaugh.
I have seen the video of Kanzi picking notes out on a piano-like keyboard, with Gabriel and members of his band playing inside the observation booth in the lab. (They did it this way because Kanzi had bitten one of his trainers a few days previously—interspecies communication is not without its ers. ) The scene is beautiful, the ape trying out the new machine and looking thoughtfully pleased with what comes out. He appears to be listening, playing the right notes. It is tentative but moving, the animal groping for something from the human world but remaining isolated from the rest of the band. It is a touching encounter, and a bold move for a musician whose tune Shock the Monkey many years ago openly condemned the horrors of less sensitive animal experiments than this.
What is the scientific value of such a jam session The business of the Research Center is the forging of greater communication between human and animal. Why not try the fertile and mysterious ground of music in addition to the more testable arena of language The advantage of hearing music in nature and trying to reach out to nature through music is that, though we don’t fully understand it, we can easily have access to it. We don’t need to explain its workings to be touched by it. Two musicians who don’t speak the same language can play together, and we can appreciate the music from human cultures far from our own.
Music needs no explanation, but it clearly expresses something deep and important, something humans cannot live without. Finding music in the sounds of birds, whales and other animals makes the farther frontiers of nature seem that much closer to us.
The best title for the passage could be ______.