As a composer and zoomusicologist, Emily Doolittle combines two loves by studying the links between human and animal music at the Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle. In October she and biologists at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Seewiesen, Germany, published an analysis of the musician wren—whose song sounds eerily human—in the Journal of Interdisciplinary Music Studies. We caught up with her by phone at her home in Seattle. How did you first become interested in birdsong? I moved to the Netherlands in 1997. One night I heard this amazing bird singing outside my window. It was also raining, so there was a beautiful backdrop of rain and wind sounds. Many of the segments of the bird’s song sounded a lot like human music—like scalar passages or arpeggios—but the way it strung them together sounded very unlike human music, at least music in the Western Classical tradition. I later found out that it was a European blackbird, so I decided to write a piece...