Research on Music and Animals

In Boston, David Schwartz has been studying the relationship of music and language for a long time. Recently, his study was published in the Journal of Neuroscience. Schwartz's study also casts light on the long-running question of whether animals understand or appreciate music. Despite the apparent abundance of "music" in the natural world -- birdsong, whalesong, wolf howls, synchronized chimpanzee hooting -- previous studies have found that many laboratory animals don't show a great affinity for the human variety of music making.
Marc Hauser and Josh McDermott of Harvard argued in the July issue of Nature Neuroscience that animals don't create or perceive music the way we do. The fact that laboratory monkeys can show recognition of human tunes is evidence, they say, of shared general features of the auditory system, not any specific chimpanzee musical ability. As for birds, those most musical beasts, they generally recognize their own tunes -- a narrow repertoire -- but don't generate novel melodies like we do. There are no avian Mozarts.
But what's been played to the animals, Schwartz notes, is human music. If animals evolve preferences for sound as we do -- based upon the soundscape in which they live -- then their "music" would be fundamentally different from ours. In the same way our scales derive from human utterances, a cat's idea of a good tune would derive from yowls and meows. To demonstrate that animals don't appreciate sounds the way we do, we'd need evidence that they don't respond to "music" constructed from their own sound environment.