In the Music section of GayaOne, not only what humans create is heard. Here, the planet itself sounds.
And today it has a big music contest.
On stage are 123 participants. Instead of spotlights, there are sunbeams among the foliage. Instead of an orchestra pit, there are forests, gardens, and city parks. Each contestant performs its own part: whistles, scatters trills, calls back, or announces itself with an unexpected cry.
The jury consists of 84 people. They know neither the names nor the appearances of the performers. Only the voice sounding in their headphones, and one question: how pleasant is it to listen to?
The highest score goes to an artist without a stage, musical instruments, or advertising.
The winner of the singing planet contest is an ordinary blackbird.
How the contest went
On 2 September 2026 in the peer-reviewed journal Frontiers in Bird Science an article was published Analyzing the acoustic parameters of bird vocalizations and their perceived pleasantness by humans — "Analysis of acoustic characteristics of bird voices and their perceived pleasantness by humans."
The study was conducted by scientists from the University of Tübingen: lead author Nadine Kalb, Gesa von Lücken, Judith Lukonowski, Florian Deschand, and senior author Christoph Randler. Randler has been observing birds since the age of ten and studies the relationship between humans and the world of birds.
The team invited 84 volunteers aged from 19 to 81 years and asked them to evaluate recordings of the voices of 123 European bird species, common in Germany.
Participants were not told the species names. The recordings were played in random order through identical headphones, and each fragment could be listened to again. Then the listeners rated the pleasantness of the voice on a scale from one to five.
At the same time, the researchers analyzed the physical properties of the recordings: frequency, amplitude, width of the frequency range, number of sound elements, and the complexity of their combination.
Thus, the personal sense of beauty met measurable acoustics.
The winner — the blackbird
First place went to the common blackbird — Turdus merula. Its song received an average of 4,52 points out of five.
Last place went to the barn owl — Tyto alba, which scored 1,32 points.
But this does not mean that the barn owl "sings badly." Bird signals did not arise for human aesthetic pleasure. They help animals find mates, mark territory, maintain contact, and warn of danger.
Each voice has its own task. And the contest existed only in human perception.
The formula of pleasant sound
What properties brought the blackbird's song to first place?
Participants more often liked relatively quiet voices with a sufficiently high fundamental frequency, a moderate frequency range, and a complex internal structure.
The result was an almost musical formula:
- variety — without chaos;
- expressiveness — without harshness;
- complexity — without overload;
- variability — within a recognizable form;
- moderate loudness — without a sense of threat.
The blackbird seemed to have found a balance between order and surprise. Its flute-like trills allow the ear to follow the melodic line, but do not reveal in advance where it will turn next.
We value a similar combination in human music. Complete predictability quickly becomes boring, while excessive complexity tires. Between them lies a space where attention remains alive.
The Earth Sounds
Every sound begins with movement.
Wind sways the treetops. Rain touches leaves and ground. Water breaks against the shore. Thunder rolls across the sky. Ocean waves and atmospheric processes create low-frequency vibrations, some of which humans cannot hear.
In the ecology of the soundscape, the natural score is divided into several components.
Geophony — the sounds of natural forces: wind, water, rain, and thunderstorms.
Biophony — the collective sound of birds, insects, amphibians, mammals, and other living beings.
Anthropophony — everything that humans add: speech, music, transport, machinery, and urban noise.
In the real world, these parts never exist separately. They meet, overlap, and create the unique acoustic pattern of each place.
A forest, an ocean coast, and a city square sound different not only because different creatures live there. The space itself conducts, absorbs, and reflects sound in different ways.
The bird as the voice of the landscape
Birds live within the sounding field of the Earth. They perceive environmental signals and respond to the world with their own voices.
In dense vegetation, sound propagates differently than in open terrain. It is influenced by foliage density, distance between trees, wind, humidity, and the voices of other inhabitants.
Studies of acoustic adaptation show that the songs of birds in closed spaces may on average have lower frequencies and a narrower range than the voices of inhabitants of open landscapes. However, the influence of the environment is small and does not explain all the diversity of bird song.
Nevertheless, the voice of a bird cannot be completely separated from the place where it was formed. It does not simply sing within a space — it becomes the living voice of the landscape itself.
Birds hear the world more broadly than we do, live within its rhythms, and add their own voices to the overall score.
Why we choose what resonates with us
New research showed that the ability to recognize birds by appearance or voice did not significantly influence ratings. To feel the beauty of a blackbird, one need not be an ornithologist.
At the same time, people who generally valued birds and had positive attitudes toward them rated their voices higher.
Consequently, perception is born in the encounter between the physical properties of sound and the listener themselves.
We choose not only with our ears.
The brain analyzes the frequency, loudness, and structure of the signal. The nervous system reacts to it as calm, interesting, or alarming. Memory adds associations.
What we call resonance, in scientific language, is composed of many processes. But the essence remains surprisingly close: among countless sounds, a person recognizes the one that becomes consonant with their inner world.
Perhaps the blackbird's voice won because in its song, the sound of nature met something deeply consonant with the human being itself.
The blackbird has long been present in modern musical culture as well. In the final part of The Beatles' song Blackbird indeed, the recording of the voice of a male common blackbird, added during mixing from the EMI sound effects library, can be heard.
Paul McCartney himself associated the piece both with a bird heard in India and with the struggle of black Americans for civil rights. Thus, the voice of nature became part of human song—and at the same time a symbol of freedom.
Perhaps we did not invent music alone. We heard that the world was already sounding—and one day we decided to join in.
What did the planet sing to us today?
Science has named the winner—the blackbird. But the singing planet has no losers.
The planet is not silent. It sounds with wind, water, and the voices of birds—and, passing through humans, continues its music in their states.
