Patients at Liverpool hospitals are to be given doses of birdsong to aid their recovery. Though doctors are uncertain of the effect, they believe that a blast of the dawn chorus is a good medicine. Clearly NHS cuts are biting deep. I assume Liverpool's medical staff have already combed the Merseyside woods for hemlock, cowbane, henbane, belladonna, yarrow and mandrake. Bismuth and bromide must be near exhaustion. Now the birds of the air are being conscripted. This government stops at nothing. For J Collis Brown read chaffinch-juice.
The songs of blackbirds, thrushes, wrens and bluetits are being re-engineered into something called "sonicstream" by the project's guru, Chris Watson. He claims they "should prove incredibly recharging and uplifting" and even offer "a new dimension to hospital neurological research". If this leads to a breakthrough, Big Pharma has had its day. All the nurses need do each morning is throw open the windows and let nature do the healing. Florence Nightingale can at last live up to her name. Indeed, as scholars at Leiden university revealed last year, modern town birds have learned to acquire local accents the better to get on with their neighbours. Liverpool patients will thus have the added pleasure of taking their morning medicine in avian Scouse.
As an early riser I have long regarded the dawn chorus as nature's answer to a Jeeves "special". Since the demise of BBC Radio's UK theme, it has become the opening fanfare of the day. It wipes clean the slate of night and offers a joyful promise to the dawn. Like an orchestra tuning up before a great symphony, it is exhilarating, and all before Farming Today is over the horizon. Liverpool's Watson rightly calls it "the very best wild music on Earth". For some reason it is particularly prominent in Britain around latitude 54 degrees north. I noticed no dawn chorus recently in Italy.
The only sadness is when the sky lightens and the birds fall silent. Watson has overcome this by recording the birdsong onto the patients' MP3 players. There is even talk of mixing it with well-known melodies into a sort of Musak of the dawn.
Science has long struggled to prove the therapeutic impact of sound. If music can help cows lactate and hens lay eggs, surely it has some role in replacing the armoury of needles, probes and drugs with which modern medicine bombards the human frame. Music is known to affect some human responses, not least sexual. Darwin was sure that birdsong was a mating invitation. Keats referred to the nightingale as "pouring forth thy soul abroad/In such an ecstacy". Boccaccio had no doubt, "hearing the nightingales sing" was a synonym for sex.
The writer Anthony Storr, in his study Music and the Mind, points out that birdsong is predominantly a male activity, requiring the production of testosterone, though he notes that "duets between male and female occur in some species". American researchers have jammed female birds full of testosterone and had them singing like canaries.
From the animal world to the human, from starlings to medieval troubadours, Don Giovanni and Tom Jones is a skip and a jump. The singer Angela Gheorghiu claims that sex immediately before a performance improves her coloratura. Led Zeppelin's singer Robert Plant said that in all his music he was "on my way to love". Before we can say robin redbreast Liverpool's female hospital patients will be out of their beds and running riot by the light of the moon, saving the NHS millions.
That said, there is still no agreement on whether birdsong is music. Stravinsky regarded natural sounds as merely hints while real music required a human agent to order its tones. The great ornithologist, Charles Hartshorne, disagreed and found in birdsong every familiar musical feature, including accelerando, crescendo, diminuendo and changes of key and tone. Studies of nightingales show that their song, when recorded and broken down, is composed of hundreds of distinct notes in a five-second burst.
The BBC before and during the war broadcast an extraordinary live concert by the cellist, Beatrice Harrison, playing a duet with a nightingale that turned up regularly outside her window for 18 years. It was finally stopped by the defence ministry when interrupted by a bomber and declared a security risk. That trio of cello, nightingale and bomber is a broadcasting history classic.
Composers such as Messiaen have grappled with expressing birdsong as formal music. So, more euphoniously, did Vaughan Williams with The Lark Ascending. To the writer, Richard Mabey, there is no contest. Birdsong is music at its purist, "the mysterious emergence of beauty from matter".
Now help is at hand. At the start of Michael Wood's excellent television programme The Story of India last month, he encountered a group of Brahmin monks in south Kerala still chanting, mostly in secret, bizarre sounds that had been preserved in their temple for centuries, handed down from father to son since before the dawn of history. Most of the noises had no detectible meaning and were impossible to notate. They emanated from deep in the human throat.
Indian scholars have found that the nearest sound patterns to these earliest of chants were those of birds. Could these mantras be a relic of the earliest pre-linguistic grunts of homo sapiens as men struggled to find meaning in communication? This was a part of India whose genetic DNA bears markers dating back to that of the earliest settlers from Africa. These earliest of sounds seems based in birdsong.
Yet even this brings us no closer to a link between the pleasure released by music/birdsong in the brain and its possibly therapeutic effect. The best metaphor I ever heard to explain why the brain recognises and likes a tune the more it is heard is that the relevant part of the brain is a field of neurons arranged like corn. The music drifts across it in a breeze, leaving its indent on the corn. The deeper the indent the easier it is for the same breeze to follow it a second time, while the deeper the indent, the closer it is to the soil where it agitates the pleasurable endorphins. The idea of musical appreciation as a waving plain of crop circles has delighted me ever since.
David Levitin's new book, This Is Your Brain on Music, is more prosaic. It details the neural impact that music has on our minds, repeating the famous maxim that a surgeon can cut a brain into a thousand pieces "and still not find a thought", or for that matter a tune. Yet the primacy of music in almost every social activity suggests its psycho-sociological importance. "Rhythm stirs our bodies as tonality and melody stirs our brains," says Levitin. It has us tapping our feet, swaying and nodding, loving and remembering, laughing and crying. No other sense produces so immediate a response.
So dump half Liverpool's hospital patients in the aviary at the zoo and I bet they get well faster than back in bed. If Darwin is right, many of them will come out married. For this we must do everything to save the ever-threatened songbirds. They are desperately needed by the NHS.
