What's in a Cheeseburger?: Alphabetical Consonants to Describe Bird Song

Premise

What if we arbitrarily assigned consonants to tell us about the relative pitches in a bird's song?
 I am going to try this.

Cheeseburger

So, for example, take the chickadee song often described as "cheese bur ger". This word doesn't automatically tell me which syllables are of higher or lower pitch than the others. But what about the last two sylables - "bur" and "ger"? Are they both on the same pitch? Not always. Sometimes the "ger" is the same pitch as the "bur", and sometimes it is slightly 'flat' - as in 'lower'.

Human Nature

Often-times, people just clue in to one song/sound they recognize, a 'key song' if you will, and ignore the rest. But, if one pays more attention to all one hears, one quickly realizes there is a lot of variation even in the cheeseburger call. Yes, it is overwhelming. Auditory memory and organization is generally not as well-developed as visual.

It is human nature that the vowel sound "ee" is going to be higher pitched than other vowel sounds. Indeed, in this case the "cheese" syllable is higher pitched than the other two. And it is human nature to focus more on the vowel sounds - I think it is hard-wired into our brains.


Assigning Consonants

If we arbitrarily assigned consonants based on pitch: higher-pitched syllables would start with a consonant occuring further along in the alphabet -- just like the letter-notation of music where pitch "G" is higher than pitch "D".

- Tee is higher than fee

- Yer is higher than bur

- hoo is higher than boo

The two-toned chickadee song - where the first syllable is the highest pitch and second and third syllables are on the same pitch, could be described as:

Yer-tu-tu

Fee-bee-bee

See-fur-fur

Gee-dee-dee

The three-toned chickadee song where each pitch is lower than the previous, could be described as:

Yer-too-blue

Fee-dee-bee (feed debbie), or Fee-de-bur (Feed de bird)

See-fur-bie

Gee-de-bur

This convention doesn't give any indication of duration of the syllables / notes in the song, but only of relative pitch. But the two main purposes of using human words to describe bird songs are to help one remember them and to communicate what one heard to another human.

"Cheeseburger" just confuses me because it doesn't tell me whether it is the two-pitched, or the three-pitched song. "Yer-tu-tu" and "feed-de-bird" make way more sense to me.

(Someone else has probably already thought of this, hehe. No matter. I'll keep trying it out for myself. )

More on alphabetical consonants to describe bird songs

In a very haphazard way, I am still trying this out (see previous post about Cheeseburgers).

So far, it is working in that it makes sense to me.

How it works is, that instead of assigning a recognizable word as a mnemonic for a bird song or to describe a bird song, one creates a description of the song such that each syllable starts with a consonant representing the pitch relative to the other syllables.  Consonants closer to the beginning of the alphabet represent a pitch lower than the following syllable which starts with a consonant closer to the end of the alphabet.

Seems simple; but not quite because it's too irritating to try to remember a bunch of pitches on the same note or the notes in the same syllable are so close together a bunch of wee wee wee's drive me crazy.

So, let's try using some other notations to break up the wee wee's with some other consonants. Let's say the consonants used in this way don't have to follow the rule where position in the alohabet represents relative pitch. Let's use:

- a hyphen between notes on the same pitch

- a ' to say the next pitch is higher

- a , to say the next pitch is lower

For example, this morning I awoke to a lifer singing outside a little ways off in the distance. It seems the White-throated Sparrow has at least two song patterns that can both be described by the mnemonic 'Oh Ca na da, Ca na da' etc. The word 'Canada' is a series of repeated notes on the same pitch or a descending series. Nothing in the words 'Oh' and 'Canada' tells on what pitch does 'Canada' start relative to the 'Oh'. And nothing indicated if the song is the type with all notes descending or the first interval ascending then repeated pitches on the 'Canada'

I heard (kinda, more-or-less): too wee, wee-dee-wee, wee, wee-dee-wee ...

Following my rules

- the first note on 'too' is lower pitched than the first 'wee'

- the second 'wee' is the same pitch as the first 'wee'

- and the wee-dee-wee's are all on the same pitch.

The bird I heard started on A flat then went up a minor third. Can you hear it in your own head? This is the ascending song. 

The descending song could be described as : wee see dee bee-dee-bee bee-dee-bee bee-dee-bee.

So three descending pitches to start then repeated pitches. 

Ok enough. Going to look for catbirds now. 

Cheers!