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Bug Music Essay

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Since the dawn of time, we humans have considered music as an arrangement of tones and rests into continuous patterns - a medium through which emotions and messages can be conveyed. In his novel, Bug Music, author, musician, and environmental philosopher, David Rothenberg, attempts to challenge all previously held beliefs surrounding how humans gained a sense of rhythm and sound. Rothenberg’s widely-acclaimed novel considers the notion that humans gained their perception of rhythm, synchronization, and sound from the great thrumming of insects. It is imperative for any student taking AP Biology to comprehend how the synchronization of rhythms is essential for cycles of nature at the ecological level, and the maintaining of the body’s balances at the level of the organism (Rothenberg, …show more content…

With a gestation period of seventeen years, the Magicicada has been believed by naturalists to be a symbol of love and music and is one of the few species with such a unique pattern of emergence. Upon awakening from their seventeen-year slumber, the great cicadas emerge in swarms of millions all along the northeastern United States to sing, mate, and die. It is still unclear why this mythical emergence only occurs on a prime-number scale. Scientists hypothesize Big Idea Three of the AP Biology Curriculum Framework highlights how genetic information is a repository of instructions necessary for the survival, growth, and reproduction of the organism. Although the reasoning behind why the cicada only emerges once every seventeen years is unclear, the insect has been genetically programmed to this routine for the entirety of its existence, meaning that whatever the reason, this emergence must be essential for the bug’s survival, growth, and

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