Imagine Lynyrd Skynyrd’s ‘Simple man’ or Nirvana’s ‘Polly’, slow and easy-going, right? Now imagine The Stooges’ Search and Destroy, quite a bit faster, right?
The first songs are about 60 bpm, and the latter is about 150. Average those out and you get to about 100 (I like round numbers). Songs that are that speed are somewhere in between: not fast and not slow, think about Beegees’ ‘Stayin’ alive’. Now we could, quite arbitrarily, equate those speeds to the cadence of walking. Which also seems to be about 100 bpm. The average human heartbeat should be around 80 beats per minute, when not looking to search and destroy, that is.
We could state that the liminal (the zone between not quite slow and not quite fast) beats per minute of music compositions equate somewhere between our heartbeats and our walking cadence expressed in steps per minute. Quite a dubious and easily made equation, but let’s go a step (or beat) further into this train of thought and transpose this to our little canary friend.
From audio recordings, I can determine my canary’s wing-flapping cadence. I’ve noted these down here below:
5 flaps – 0,282s
6 flaps – 0,269s
15 flaps – 0,578s
15 flaps – 0,479s
15 flaps – 0,594s
11 flaps – 0,72s
In total, we count 67 flaps in 3,058 seconds. Which averages to about 1314 flaps per minute (although I can imagine some might not find this sample size satisfactory). Studies have shown a canary’s heartbeat is around 1000bpm. Peculiar how a human’s heart bpm is about 80% of its cadence steps per minute, and we see a similar ratio for canaries (1000 beats per minute over 1314 flaps per minute=76.1%).
The canary’s heart beats about 12,5 times faster than ours. It flaps about 13,14 times faster than our steps. Extrapolating these values it seems only natural its temporal perception for information sequences is about 13 times as intense. We could also dubiously assume it encodes its information in a sequence that is about 13 times as dense.
If we were to interpret its song, we could again, very dubiously, claim that we ought to listen to it slowed down to about 7,7% for it to match our liminal frequency. I did this to the recording of one of his songs. Listen to it below, I find it quite relaxing.
Now let’s assume we can also run this translation in reverse for my canary. This is Henry Mancini’s version of ‘Moon River’ (Vocals By Audrey Hepburn) sped up by 1200%. Needless to say, he is significantly more aroused by it compared to playing the original version of the song (and that is just subjectively speaking). I’ll play it to him twice daily for a month to see if he picks up any themes from it.
Addendum (09/04/22): I recently found Jakob von Uexküll’s A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans. In which he described a similar experiment, and similar findings, be it about a snail. He did experiments concerning snails’ time perception (which I find really intriguing conceptually, and also quite humorous).
