Eastern and Western world music.

After BT last year, we wanted to investigate deeper into the hypothesis and find out more about the connection between the origin of music and birdsong. We also wanted to look at different countries and how there is such a wide variety of music all around the world. Our belief is that

Due to the lack of migrating birds between the eastern and western regions of the world, we witness a huge contrast in the countries’ music traditions and genres.

• Chinese music (East): The music in China has had a similar structure for many hundreds of years. It is based on the pentatonic scale. This means that their musical scale has five notes per octave (gōng 宫, shāng 商, jué 角, zhǐ 徵 and yǔ 羽) in contrast to the western heptatonic (seven note) scale i.e. the major scale and minor scale. Although some western world music uses the pentatonic scale, the heptatonic scale would be more common in the western part of the world than the eastern part so the average person from the western world would find Chinese music very different a Chinese music contains several micro notes which are found in between more commonly used notes. Their instruments consist of strings, percussion and woodwind.

• Irish music (West): Irish traditional music is based on the heptatonic scale (seven notes in an octave). Unlike Chinese music, Irish music can be broken down into many different categories, for example jigs, reels, slow airs etc. Irish music is used for many different dances such as Sean-Nós-Dancing, Irish dancing, and other types of set dancing. There are Irish pieces in the major, minor and modal keys which can be a jig or a reel as well as others such as hornpipes. The Irish instruments consist of percussion, string, some wind instruments (tin whistle) but very little brass.

There have been many people migrating to and from the East and West sides of the world but there have not been much bird migration due to the long distance and the geographical relief. I believe that since these birds have not migrated between these two countries, they haven’t got a chance to influence the music.