Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic For the past 10 years, every spring, Sam Lee has taken up residence in the woods in Sussex to sing with the nightingales that descend upon its coppice. The age-old question of whether man and animal can communicate has returned again in the age of machine learning, as computers set about trying to interpret animal sounds.Lee is a folk musician first and is playing at Glastonbury this year. For him, interpretation of a nightingale is not the question. \u201cIt is jazz spirit,\u201d he says. \u201cAll jazz musicians are complex people underneath, and nightingales a complex bird.\u201d The male has one of the most challenging of all birdsongs, an improvisation of whistles, buzzes, chugs, slurs and croons, sung in darkness to attract a mate. \u201cThere\u2019s a deep intelligence there. To evolve such a complexity of song, it\u2019s more than just trying to indicate their strengths. It\u2019s communicating something to each other of knowledge and we don\u2019t understand what that knowledge is.\u201dSinging with nightingales is not a new phenomenon. It entered the British imagination in 1924. Beatrice Harrison, a cellist who debuted Delius\u2019s Cello Concerto and was a favourite of Elgar, had been practising in her garden in Oxted in Surrey when a nightingale joined in. She wrote to Lord Reith, director-general of the BBC, then in its infancy.\u201cShe had convinced Lord Reith somehow to get technicians to try out this new technology of outside recording capabilities with a microphone to come into her garden, to wind out miles of cable, bring massive trucks of batteries, from a two-year-old BBC,\u201d says Lee.The evening was broadcast live. The nightingale declined to join in for her rendition of Rimsky-Korsakov or Elgar but when Harrison struck up the Londonderry Air \u2014 a tune now better known as \u201cDanny Boy\u201d \u2014 the nightingale sang. The performance mesmerised the nation. On its 90th anniversary in 2014, Lee wrote to the BBC suggesting it should run a documentary on it and they asked him to front it. That year the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO) report The State of the UK\u2019s Birds found that the nightingale population had declined by 43 per cent in the previous 20 years. Wintering in sub-Saharan Africa, as do other species such as the cuckoo and the swift, the nightingale flies north to Europe and the Asian steppe, to its mating grounds. Whereas there had been tens of thousands up until the 1970s, the UK was down to about 5,550 males in 2012.Harrison\u2019s recording is \u201can apocryphal tale of Britain\u2019s unique experience of discovering the musicality of the nightingale\u201d, says Lee. Different cultures have long played music with nightingales. In Afghan folklore, it was the players of the rubab and tar \u2014 traditional lutes \u2014 who, Lee says, were said to have achieved mastery of the instrument when a nightingale comes to perch on the lute\u2019s tuning pegs.When recording the documentary for the BBC, Lee went out with a classical string trio to see if he could lure the nightingale into a jam. \u201cThe bird started to sing back with us, and I was like: this is unbelievable.\u201dThis began the decade-long ritual of the retreat to the Sussex woods and also another in Gloucestershire, both private locations, where paying guests came to join him on a twilight walk to sit beneath a nightingale.\u201cIf you start making music, they don\u2019t fly off. They carry on singing, increase their volume, adapt their song, augment their music to come to key with you into rhythm. They harmonise.\u201d It is not indiscriminate. Lee takes out various musicians with him. \u201cWith some musicians the bird will go absolutely nuts. It\u2019s not about the instrument, it\u2019s about the instrumentalist. They\u2019re great recognisers of humans and spirit, and there are a thousand stories of how they\u2019ve just known exactly what\u2019s going on: somebody\u2019s carrying grief. Somebody who\u2019s electric. Somebody who\u2019s really grounded. Newborn babies \u2014 they will always appear for newborn babies.\u201d The closest Lee has ever come was when he brought his daughter, then six weeks old, now six years old, to one of his events. \u201cBy day I went out and a nightingale flew up on to the branch right above and just blasted song.\u201dLee knows 12 pairs in the Sussex woodland. He recognises the returners and the first-timers. \u201cYou recognise their decorative technique,\u201d he says. Nightingales return to the same territory every year and once the fledglings are mature, they do too, fighting it out with brothers for territory.If you start making music, they don\u2019t fly off. They carry on singing, increase their volume, adapt their song, augment their music to come to key with you into rhythm. They harmoniseThe BTO suggests the decline in numbers could be attributed to deer browsing. Now in record populations in the UK, muntjac in particular destroy the understory in which the birds breed: nightingales are ground nesters feeding off beetles and bugs.Berlin, where there are few deer and a lot of scrubland, has around 1,500 breeding pairs, Lee says: \u201cthe hedgerows and messiness\u201d of the city pay off. The decline may also have to do with climate change \u2014 the insects on which they feed hatch sooner and are out of sync with their arrivals \u2014 or to do with their wintering grounds in Africa, which is also facing changes in agriculture and climate.Numbers are higher in Europe where it is warmer, so they have two mating seasons, as opposed to just the one in the UK, where they now only go as far north as the Humber, between Yorkshire and Lincolnshire. In Europe they also appear to be less specific about the habitat they need. In the UK, \u201cif it is not ideal, they won\u2019t nest. The males won\u2019t locate. Females won\u2019t find a mate.\u201dBut part of the reason for the UK decline is the country\u2019s urge to build, says Lee. \u201cThe brownfield sites \u2014 a lot of birds like them as they are usually quite biodiverse. They\u2019re being sold off and turned into development. If it is a newt or bat you can\u2019t go there. But nightingales are not a Schedule 1 listed species so you can build.\u201dThe nightingale is not the only songbird that Lee believes he can vibe with. He is part of the opening ceremony for a new Glastonbury venue, the Tree Stage in the Woodsies area, alongside Merlin Sheldrake and Emily Eavis, where he will perform a sound and light show around a 300-year-old Somerset oak, upturned with its roots in the air. The idea is to reimagine the tree as living, and home to birds such as the turtle dove and nightingale.He is already singing alongside the turtle dove, which faces extinction in the UK. Lee leads a pilgrimage to Knepp, the rewilded estate in West Sussex, which increased its number to 20 singing males in 2021. On the walk he plays Ralph Vaughan Williams\u2019s 1907 wax-cylinder recording of pub landlord David Penfold\u2019s rendition of the old English folk song about the dove. \u201cThey are very shy birds but almost every year we\u2019ve heard them turring at dawn.\u201d Musically, he tries to find a low resonant baritone with them. \u201cThey don\u2019t improvise but it is like hearing the rarest of songs.\u201dThe curlew, a moorland bird, is another he is trying to find a musical language for. It has \u201ca heartbreaking crooning like a dying siren\u201d, he says. Then there is the nightjar, which churrs and beats its wings rhythmically. \u201cIt sounds a little bit more like a sort of radiophonics workshop job,\u201d says Lee, referring to the old audio departments that develop sounds. Ashdown Forest in East Sussex has had some success in keeping up its nightjar numbers through specialist grazing. Lee describes the nightingale as \u201cdecorators of silence\u201d. \u201cThey sing and they are quiet. They listen.\u201d Communication will not happen in a conventional way. Lee mentions an evening in the Sussex woods last week. One nightingale, a usually reliable participant in the evening, was holding back from Lee and his musicians.\u201cSo I started singing an old folk song,\u201d says Lee. He sang the line: \u201cI sat myself down to view all around, and the song the nightingale echoes all around.\u201d At that moment, \u201cright on cue it burst into song\u201d, he says.His audience was astonished, as was Lee. \u201cThey are listening in to us,\u201d he says. \u201cTo ask or demand it sing would have no impact. But to sing to it \u2014 that is a different language. I often think song is the closest thing to prayer and the bird hears it in very different ways. Music is a very powerful form of communication \u2014 not of the intellect but of the heart.\u201dFind out about our latest stories first \u2014 follow @FTProperty on X or @ft_houseandhome on Instagram<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic For the past 10 years, every spring, Sam Lee has taken up residence in the woods in Sussex to sing with the nightingales that descend upon its coppice. The age-old question of whether man and animal can communicate has returned again in the age<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-95229","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-culture"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95229","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=95229"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95229\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":95230,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95229\/revisions\/95230"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=95229"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=95229"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=95229"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}