Eavesdropping on the Inaudible: The Cryptic Love Songs of Fruit Flies

 

During her studies at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London, Maaike undertook an acoustic research project focusing on the love songs that fruit flies produce. For this, she collaborated with Professor Joerg Albert at University College London, where they recorded different species of fruit flies singing various songs. For her final project, she composed a piece for bass flute and fruit flies, which she presented with live, amplified fruit flies on stage.

 

“My interest in fruit flies began when my flatmate, Peter Rennert, moved into my house earlier this year. He is a PhD student at University College London, researching the behavior of fruit flies. I was struck by how much he knew about these small creatures and became fascinated by the videos he recorded of them in his lab. When I read more about fruit flies, I discovered that the sounds they make are often courtship songs. When I asked Peter if he knew more about this, he put me in touch with Senior Lecturer Joerg Albert, also at UCL. We first met six months ago when I visited him at the UCL Ear Institute, where he conducts much of his research on fruit flies. He gave me a heavily condensed (but no less dazzling) overview of fruit fly love songs. Two hours later, I left the Ear Institute somewhat stunned by the amount of information Joerg had conveyed.

 

There are 2,000-3,000 different species of fruit flies, and each species has a unique song consisting of various pulse patterns and pitch differences. In the mating ritual, the male fly dances for the female fly. While doing this, he vibrates one of his wings, creating sounds heard by the female. This ‘song’ consists of different pulse patterns and ‘humming sounds’ to which the female responds by being available for copulation. For many species, reproduction doesn’t occur (or is much less likely) without this singing ritual. Having traveled extensively over the last two years to study indigenous music from around the world, I couldn’t help but think that fruit flies have their own type of folk music as well.

 

I began listening to the recordings Joerg made of the courtship songs, using them as inspiration for my own music. Listening to them was a magical experience but also quite challenging, as I didn’t want to ‘mess’ with them too much. It felt like improvising on a theme without knowing the theme, so there were no points of recognition. I spent half a year conducting creative experiments with this material, both musical and conceptual. I aimed to focus people’s attention on it, open this secret universe of sound to the audience, and frame the sounds in a creative way. I really liked what Joerg said in the interview for Resonance FM: “What science and art do is translate things into different languages and slightly transpose them to facilitate some sort of appreciation (…) it has to do with reflecting and representing a certain way our world is constructed. We have a certain insight, we realize something, and then we communicate that. We communicate this from a certain perspective, from an individual standpoint, so we filter the world.”

 

I realized that my project became more of a listening practice; it was as if the fruit flies had unlocked my ears for details in sound. When I conducted a project last year in which I made field recordings in my garden on cassette tape, I became more aware of the sounds in my surroundings. It’s like John Cage said: ‘Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating.’ But the fruit flies added a new layer—a layer of delicate sounds, in the near field of my own ears. I became more interested in the quiet sounds of my own instrument, the flute, and particularly the bass flute, as it has so many beautiful hidden sounds. Additionally, the bass flute’s pitch range is closer to the range in which the flies sing their songs.

 

The human tendency to anthropomorphize animals has been present throughout this project. From the beginning, I couldn’t help but make connections between my own life and behavior and that of the flies. I find them cute, kept them as pets in a tube in my house to observe them, and was sad when they all died after I left the heating off during a week I was away. I even found myself developing a specific preference for certain fruit fly singers because they seemed to have ‘personality.’ I must admit, I’m quite obsessed with fruit flies. Once you notice them, they are everywhere! I’m pretty sure that after reading this and listening to their songs, you will see them everywhere and never look at them the same way again.”