The Red Notebook

Reminiscing about his father, Charles Darwin’s son Francis wrote:

In the evening, that is, after he had read as much as his strength would allow, and before the reading aloud began, he would often lie on the sofa and listen to my mother playing the piano. He had not a good ear, yet in spite of this he had a true love of fine music. He used to lament that his enjoyment of music had become dulled with age, yet within my recollection his love of a good tune was strong. I never heard him hum more than one tune, the Welsh song “Ar hyd y nos,” which he went through correctly;

Ar hyd y nos—better known to us heathen English as All Through the Night—is a classic Welsh folk tune. Perhaps Darwin was familiar with it having been brought up near the Welsh border.

I think it’s delightful that we know which tune Darwin used to hum to himself. Especially since it is such a wonderful, moving tune:

Happy 201st birthday, Mr D.

Iechyd da!

I’m rapidly coming round to the conclusion that there aren’t enough dinosaurs in this blog. Dinosaurs are what bring the punters in, it’s a well-known fact. Especially dancing ones.

So, without further ado, I give you a nice little video mashup created by someone calling themself alargedog (if that is indeed their real name) of Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band’s rather wonderful (if scientifically inaccurate) Smithsonian Institute Blues:

To paraphrase Antennae Jimmy Semens from said Magic Band, this is the song that’s going to make The Red Notebook fat.

Charles Darwin carried out some pretty weird experiments in his time. The dead pigeon stuffed full of seeds floating in salt water, that was one of his. So was searching for seeds in the mud on ducks’ feet. But the experiment that really took the biscuit was the one in which he played music to worms. As he explains in the first chapter of The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms:

Worms do not possess any sense of hearing. They took not the least notice of the shrill notes from a metal whistle, which was repeatedly sounded near them; nor did they of the deepest and loudest tones of a bassoon. They were indifferent to shouts, if care was taken that the breath did not strike them. When placed on a table close to the keys of a piano, which was played as loudly as possible, they remained perfectly quiet.

Playing a bassoon to earthworms eighty years before anyone ever heard the name Monty Python: Charles Darwin was years ahead of his time.

Indeed he was. Imagine my delight yesterday, reading an article in New Scientist [subscribers only link] describing a number of modern-day experiments which involved playing music to animals. Here’s my favourite:

Ava Chase of the Rowland Institute at Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has shown that carp can tell the difference between baroque music and John Lee Hooker, depressing a button with their snouts to indicate which is which (Animal Learning & Behavior, vol 29, p 336).

Playing baroque music and the blues to carp. Darwin (and Python) would have been delighted.

But doesn’t Ms Chase realise that fish prefer sole music?

Note: The Rowland Institute website has a page about Ava Chase’s fish laboratory, which contains links to videos of her carp experiments, and a copy of her paper Music discriminations by carp (Cyprinus carpio) [PDF].