Birdsong Not Music, After All
In the Hans Christian Andersen tale "The
Nightingale," a songbird melts an emperor's heart with its singing, but
flies away when the ruler forces it to sing duets with a jeweled, mechanical
bird that warbles only waltzes. There's a moral here, a new study suggests.
Although humans have long attributed musical qualities to birdsong, cold, hard
statistics show that's all an illusion.
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