What Do Other Animals Think of Human Music?

Clearly your cat LOVES your music, but what about other creatures in the animal Kingdom? This video seeks to explore what animals think of human music, with parrots, foxes, tamarins, orangutans, rats and more, backed up with Behavioural research, neuroscience and music cognition. Adam Cole explores the biological and psychological foundations of music and whether music acts as a universal language or if our appreciation for melodies is uniquely tied to human cognitive evolution. Here's more...

Do animals actually like music -- or are humans just projecting? In this episode of Howtown, we investigate the science of animals and music through experiments with cotton-top tamarins, orangutans, rats, mice, parrots, dogs, cats, and a wild fox who seemed captivated by a banjo. We look at what animal behavior research, neuroscience, and music cognition can tell us about rhythm, pitch, melody, consonance, dissonance, emotion, reward, pattern recognition, and why human brains find music so powerful.

Along the way, we explore studies on cotton-top tamarins preferring silence to human music, orangutans choosing silence over different music genres, rats conditioned to prefer Miles Davis, mice exposed to Beethoven during development, dogs howling along to favorite songs, and Snowball the cockatoo dancing to the beat. Featuring conversations with researchers and musicians including Aniruddh Patel, Pralle Kriengwatana, David Teie, Suzanne MacDonald, and Andy Thorn, this episode asks: can animals hear music the way we do? Can they recognize rhythm or melody? Do they feel emotion from music? And what does animal music research reveal about the evolution of music in humans?

Here are the timestamps:

00:00 the song 00:56 the fox 02:09 what's music? 02:56 pitch = rhythm 05:57 incogni 07:00 tamarins & taste 08:35 orangutans & opera 10:22 other species 11:11 rats & reward 12:38 parrots & patterns 13:46 complex vocal learning 15:55 shallow howl 17:24 melody 18:41 consonance v dissonance 20:09 mice & memory 22:27 more than a feeling 23:39 the cellist 25:46 composing the song 28:41 the monkey's listen 30:26 good anthropomorphizing?

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