Are We the Only Species to Hear Music?

[Brett Lanier]

I once put headphones on my cousin's dog's head (a Great Pyrenees). After I took the headphones off, he (the dog) repeatedly pawed my arm holding the headphones, insisting that I put them back on. As soon as I did, he seemed content again. It was a tape of the Grateful Dead Europe 72 album.

[Russell Adkins]

I think animals have a thing in their makeup that's musical , birds seem to sing as we call it, crickets do their thing , frogs make sounds dogs howl like wolves . a rooster crows etc etc , im not sure they think of it as music like humans do. it seems that they communicate like humans do with musical sounds , besides, music is a God given gift that all of creation can enjoy don't ya think ?

[Charlie McDonald]

'The flutelike songs of the male hermit thrush (Catharus guttatus) are some of the most beautiful in the animal kingdom. Now, researchers have found that these melodies employ the same mathematical principles that underlie many Western and non-Western musical scales—the first time this has been seen in any animal outside humans. The scientists analyzed the spectrograms (barcodelike representations of the frequencies in a sound) of 71 songs containing 10 or more notes made by 14 of the birds; the songs were collected across North America over more than 50 years by various individuals. Their statistical models showed that 57 of these songs closely resembled what musicians term a harmonic series—that is, the pitches of the notes follow a mathematical distribution known as integer multiples. Human musical scales are governed by these same mathematical constraints. It’s doubtful that the similarity is due to the physics of the birds’ vocal tract, the team reports online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Rather, it seems male hermit thrushes choose to sing notes from these harmonic series. It may be that such notes are easier for the males to remember, or provide a ready yardstick for their chief critics—female hermit thrushes.
The study adds to other research indicating that human music is not solely governed by cultural practices, but is also at least partially determined by biology.'

Posted in Biology, Plants & Animals

[Earnest Bovine]

Dogs can sing too. Replace your unmanageable girl singer with man's best friend (Caninus):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFzKgBfroAc

If dog food is busting your tour budget, try bird seed (Hatebeak):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rwQuPCqA5AI