Musical Semiotics

The compositional devices deployed by Rimsky-Korsakov to make “Flight of the Bumblebee” sound like a bee, and why certain musical sounds evoke bees in the human imagination.

Georgia Cook, Harriet Earle, Ben Shailer, Richard Zhao

“Flight of the Bumblebee” by Rimsky-Korsakov is easily one of the most recognisable pieces of classical music, infamous for the speed that the notes are played, creating the convincing sound of a buzzing bumblebee. The piece originally was wrien as an orchestral interlude for the opera The Tale of Tsar Saltan and has since been arranged most notably into piano by Rachmaninoff but also for the violin, flute and many other instruments.

French entomologists Antoine Magnan and André Saint-Laguë asserted in their 1934 publication Le Vol des Insectes that according to some rough calculations, bumblebees should not be able to fly.54 Of course, Magnan and Saint-Laguë were wrong in their calculations due to the assumption of a fixed-wing aerodynamic flight system when bees fly, when instead bees simultaneously flap and rotate their wings, which leads us to more complicated aerodynamics and fluid dynamics unknown at the time.55

The sound that humans hear to be the buzzing as a bee flies is detected through high-frequency vibrations of air molecules onto the eardrum caused by the beating of a bee’s wing at approximately 230 Hz.56 Like many insects, bees’ wings are aached to the thorax and are not aached directly to muscles, instead being pulled

54 B. Kirkpatrick et al., “Honey Bee Flight: An Inquiry,” University of Colorado Boulder, 2015. 55D.L. Altshuler, et al., “Short-amplitude high-frequency wing strokes determine the aerodynamics of honeybee flight,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 102(50), 2005, pp. 18213–18218. 56Altshuler et al., 2005.

by the contraction of dorsoventral muscles and dorsal-longitudinal muscles inside the thorax, making the wings both flap and rotate (Fig. 1). These muscles can contract multiple times from a single nerve impulse, and ultimately beat at more than 200 times a second.

Fig. 1. Contraction of dorsoventral and dorsal-longitudinal muscles in the bee’s thorax moves the wings in their flap and rotation.

Fig. 2. Diagram showing the non-linear plane of wing movement of a bee. However, a key aspect of the bee’s flight is that at such a small size, the Reynolds number associated with their flight, approximated to be about 1123, puts them in the region where the fluid air around them is considered to be laminar and acts with high viscosity.57 This means that the forces exerted by the wings are much greater than previously anticipated, affecting airflow and lift in ways unbeknownst to Magnan and Saint-Laguë in 1934. With this in mind, the oscillation cycle of the wings at a high angle of aack creates a dynamic stall above the wings, which in turn leads to the formation of a leading edge vortex where there is significantly

57 H. Aono and H. Liu, “Flapping wing aerodynamics of a numerical biological flyer model in hovering flight,” Computers and Fluids Vol 85, 2013, pp. 85–92.

lower pressure than the surrounding air, generating the lift required to keep the bee hovering.58

However, the real issue of this question is how humans process sound and music; whilst Korsakov’s piece is not intended to perfectly mimic the sound of a bee’s flight, it still invokes the memory of a bee within the listener. Therefore, we need to investigate which parts of music correlate the most to memories within a listener: in a study published in 2008 by the Journal of Experimental Psychology, tempo was shown to have a sufficient impact on how music interacts with our memory.59 Specifically, when a piece was implicitly heard (i.e. not actively tried to be memorised), the tempo of a piece was shown to have a significant positive impact on its ability to be recalled, and more importantly, related to other pieces of music. However, a key distinction here is between the real tempo of the piece, and its heard tempo: with relation to the piece, the tempo is distinct (compared to other pieces of music) as the lack of emphasis on particular beats (with exception for the first of every measure), causes the “tempo” to be heard instead by the rate at which the dissonance builds in the perception of the listener. Whilst the average pitch of a bee’s flight is 230 Hz, translating to a Bb (+ 23 cents), this pitch oscillates over the course of a bee’s flight, lower when they take off and land;60 in turn, the dissonances which Korsakov builds, using Bb chromatics, allow him to combine tempo and timbre, which were seen as the two most influential aspects of recalling memories of sound. And so one way in which “Flight of the Bumblebee” aempts to capture the feeling of a real bee is by imitating the tempo of a bee’s flight. frantic pace of the storyline, through its sense of direction and the ever-increasing speed of notes. It builds

58 J. Vance et al., “Hovering Flight in the Honeybee Apis mellifera: Kinematic Mechanisms for Varying Aerodynamic Forces.” 59 A. Halpern and D. Müllensiefen, “Effects of timbre and tempo change on memory for music,” Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 61 (9), 2008, pp. 1371–1384. 60 phys.unsw.edu.au/music/note/ [accessed 07/11/2022].

tension as the bee is travelling towards the kingdom. The piece is played at 200 bpm and although the tempo does not actually change, shorter notes are added to create a frantic feeling. Finally, when the bee reaches its destination, the piece comes to a climax. Another way in which Korsakov aempts to imitate the sound of a genuine bee is that the main melody of “Flight of the Bumblebee” was wrien to be played by violins. Korsakov made this choice as violins are string instruments therefore the strings vibrating imitate the vibrating wings of real bees in flight. Furthermore, violins play in a higher register than most instruments, which adds to the energetic and excitable sound that bees create.

Fig. 3. A section of the melody in The Flight of the Bumblebee, played by a violin. The above extract shows a short part of the violin solo that takes the lead throughout the piece and creates the main melody. As can be seen, all the notes are slurred and no notes are given any particular accent. Therefore, even though there are many fast-changing notes, they almost join together and sound like one continuous hum. This imitates the continuous drone that is heard when a bumblebee is buzzing as they make lots of miniature very quick sounds that blur together to sound like one. Chromaticism further emulates the tiny microdecisions made by bees. Furthermore, Korsakov builds dissonance with the objective of matching the memorable aspect of the bee’s flight – by stacking semitone dissonances that rotate around different bases of keys (technically a modulation every time the root of the chromatic shifts, with Korsakov tending towards a darker route around the circle of fifths) Korsakov helps to mimic the unique dissonance of a bee’s flight. This relates to the way a bee “swims” through the air and the vortex which the wing strokes create, as mentioned above – it stacks sound waves

through the air, with overlapping vibrating air particles, creating similar dissonance semitones apart (as in the chromatics used by Korsakov) with the larger changes and explorations of different keys caused by the lower frequencies as the bee is taking off/landing. Finally, with the tempo of the piece being the rate at which these semitonal dissonances build, Korsakov mimics a bee’s flight through manipulations of its most memorable and important aspect, its dissonance. In “Flight of the Bumblebee,” Rimsky-Korsakov uses techniques and instruments to imitate the sound and feel of a buzzing bee. He achieved this, as the tempo and continuous drone of the piece are distinctly reminiscent of bumblebees. This has given “Flight of the Bumblebee” a place in popular culture, as sports teams, television shows, and more have used it for bee mascots. Rimsky-Korsakov was very successful in making “Flight of the Bumblebee” remind the audience of a bee, so much that it has flourished in the modern day.