# What do other animals think of human music?

## Метаданные

- **Канал:** Howtown
- **YouTube:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZYhyewNQMo
- **Дата:** 01.05.2026
- **Длительность:** 32:10
- **Просмотры:** 1,088,488
- **Источник:** https://ekstraktznaniy.ru/video/50454

## Описание

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## Транскрипт

### the song []

I've got a song for you. This is a song that was written with a particular audience in mind. The Cotton Top Tamarind Monkey. — It's almost like a ' 80s rock band hair. — It really is. Why don't you just take a listen to the song? — All right, here we go. — Oh, it's very screechy. — According to the creators of this song, Camerons find this more engaging and relaxing than human music. But of course, as we ask on this channel every time, how do they know that? — How do you write music for another species? And how can you tell if they like it? What do other animals think of music in general? So, for this episode, I put together this playlist, nine songs played by humans for animals that will lead us through a series of experiments, studies that reveal what's going on in their brains and also help explain why our species loves music so much. This is the video that first got me

### the fox [0:56]

wondering about what other animals think of music. Wow. This certain fox family went through our yard every day. And slowly we realized how curious they were about the music they were hearing. The fox was the only friend we were allowed to see during the pandemic, you know, and it really was he was like our companion. The part that I really love is like about halfway through this video, the fox like, you know, walks off and then the fox comes back and he's like and he sits down just like, — "Sits down. — Please continue. I'm not done listening. " There are a bunch of viral videos in this genre and they tap into this very old idea that shows up across cultures that musicians like Orpheus can somehow commune with beasts. This is an idea that we really want to believe. — Universal language. — Yeah, universal language. Exactly. Is there something special about music that can transcend species? Is there something going on in this fox's brain that's similar to what's going on in our brain when we listen to music? — Maybe it can draw from the patterns that feels in nature or something. Music is based on patterns really. — Before we like get into the research, I

### what’s music? [2:09]

think we should define what music is. — Yeah. What is it? Is it is it the rhythm that it has to have like this certain hit these certain beats? — There unfortunately isn't like a real agreed upon definition from scholars. The simplest definition that I was able to scrge up was music is sound organized into patterns. So you can have patterns that are organized across time like this repeating sound a very simple rhythm which we can complicate by emphasizing different beats — uh emphasis — or assigning different beats to different sounds or subdividing the pattern. And of course we can also organize sounds based on their frequency higher and lower pitches.

### pitch = rhythm [2:56]

pitches. And the really cool thing, and I think this is sort of the craziest part about music, is that the pitches we hear, high and low, are actually at their core also just rhythms. Different rhythms, super sped up. So if we take that beat that I was playing before, and double its speed over and over and over again, once you get fast enough, it stops sounding like individual hits, right? That last buzz is actually playing a note. It's this note C3 we call it. — Yeah. It's that same note. It's a little like scratchy and grainy. But if we were to start with me hitting the guitar twice as fast and then we speed that up the same number of times. — We end up with C4. We think of this as just the same note as C3, just an octave up. — It's really just the same beat. It's the same beat when it's doubled. When the beat is twice as fast, it goes up one octave. So, we go from C3 to C4. Now, here's where it gets pretty crazy. What if I play three beats in the time that original rhythm had two beats? Now, if we take that beat, speed that up the same number of times, that gives us the note G. So that's, you know, five steps up on the normal scale. So we call it a fifth interval. And it's this very, you know, open sort of powerful interval. It's like 2001 Space Odyssey or Star Wars. — Those are all that fifth interval — and it's all based on these ratios. So 3:2. And if you zoom in on the waveforms of these tones, you can literally see three peaks for every two. — I feel like you're really magic school busing music here, Adam. — Other simple ratios of beats give us other intervals. If we have four beats versus three, and we speed that up, we get this fourth interval. Five versus three, a sixth. Five versus four, a third. So these are all just mathematical patterns that are ratios of vibrations coming through the air hitting our ears. Our ears are translating those vibrations into neurons firing in those same patterns. And the ears of other animals are doing essentially the same thing. They might be optimized for different frequencies, but it's the same process. The equipment is there to be able to detect these patterns that we identify as so nice and musical. But do the patterns mean anything to the fox? And by mean anything, you just mean does it change their effective experience? — Yeah, exactly. Or put another way, are they listening to that and being like, "That's nice. " Like we are, — right? — So, let us get into some of these experiments. — Okay.

### incogni [5:57]

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### tamarins & taste [7:00]

Imagine being ushered into a room and told to wait for 5 minutes. There's a line of tape down the middle of the room and when you walk to one side, you can hear a flute playing. On the other side, silence. Which side do you spend more time on is the question. — Okay. On the side with the music. — The Harvard undergrads in this study did indeed spend most of their time on the side with music. And so, you can sort of infer they're getting something out of that music. Maybe it's like they're really enjoying it. Maybe it's just like a nice distraction. But whatever it is, it's somehow more positive than silence. Of course, with these undergrads, you could just ask them, "What did you think of this music? " But they couldn't do that with the other subjects of this experiment, which were the cotton top tamarind monkeys that we met before. These tamarinds come from land forest in Colombia, and they're tiny. They weigh about a pound, half a kilo, and their brains are the size of a cherry tomato. Instead of a divided room, the tamarinds entered a branched passageway with treats to encourage them to explore. If they hung out in one side, they heard flute music, the other side, silence. And here are the results. — The tamarinds prefer the silence. — Pretty universally, the tamarinds preferred to spend their time on the silent side of the maze. — This was one of the first studies where they tried to directly ask an animal if it liked music. And the answer seemed to be no. But maybe that's because they don't just they don't have quite big enough brains to be doing the same thing that our brains are doing. And so you might want to try a couple branches over on the evolutionary tree closer to us.

### orangutans & opera [8:35]

— When orangutans are in the zoo, the zookeepers usually play the radio. So I just mostly wanted to find out, you know, should we switch it from the classic rock station to classical or jazz? Like I don't know, what did I want to listen to? — Researchers set up an experiment where the rangutans were played snippets of different genres. Using a stick and a touchcreen, they had the option to replay the clip or listen to 30 seconds of silence, after which a new random song would play. After hundreds of tests, the results were clear. No matter what the genre, orangutans mostly picked silence. — Very pretty close. It's not that far off. — Very pretty close, but apparently still statistically significantly more likely to choose silence. But yeah, there's definitely individual variation. The other thing they were able to do was watch their behavior. And even though they had voluntarily approached the screen and could leave at any time, none of them seemed to enjoy the activity. They all displayed classic behaviors of orangutan frustration. Overall, the message seemed to be, — "I don't want your stinking music. " That was my hubris that I thought, "Oh, well, it must be important to Rangtans cuz it's important to us. " And then we thought, "Okay, well, maybe they can't even distinguish that music is music. " Like, maybe music doesn't mean anything to them. They scrambled up songs and played them backwards. And then they tried to train the orangutans to tell the mangled versions and the originals apart, but they couldn't do it. — They can't tell the difference between the song and the song backwards and chopped up. — Exactly. — So, the takeaway from both of these primates is kind of that what's music to us is noise to them. — That's what it seems to be. It's not something that is giving any of the beauty that we find in music. But what about other species? — We're doing a systematic review of all

### other species [10:22]

the studies that have looked at whether animals like music. — Paul Green Watner's search turned up studies of several different species across the animal family tree. — Some of them seem to like it. prefer silence and some don't care. It's kind of all over the map. — It's And there's not really a pattern, you know, across species. Animals that are more similar to each other in terms of evolutionary lineage don't necessarily respond in the same way. — These studies show that animals brains work differently than ours, but they can't tell us much about exactly how those brains work. — We just have to ask more nuance questions than do animals like music. That's just way too blunt. I think — we need to be asking what's going on in our brains that make us enjoy music and do any of those things happen in the brains of other animals?

### rats & reward [11:11]

This was used in a study of rats. One room they can listen to this song and in another silence. Well, the rats chose to spend most of their time in the silent room. — Unless the scientists made one slight change to the experimental setup, one little trick. — They pitch it up. — No, they gave the rats cocaine whenever they listened to Miles Davis. I would have never guessed that in a million years. — Yeah. Once they had listened to Miles on cocaine enough, they didn't even need the cocaine. They would just kind of go into this little jazz lounge and just like hang out because the music was setting off their reward system in anticipation. What's interesting is that humans don't need drugs for music to have this effect. Music can hit our reward system all on its own. And so the question is, why does music do that to us? It's just the sounds. And they're not even sounds that are particularly like relevant to our survival. — Our pleasure doesn't necessarily derive from just the sound is nice, but we are really trying to pull out patterns from the song to make sense of it. It's predictable to some extent. And so our brains enjoy listening to it because we're constantly trying to predict what comes next. And most of the time we get it right. — And so if an animal is going to enjoy music like we do, it probably has to have some of those same pattern recognition and prediction capabilities.

### parrots & patterns [12:38]

Oh, we got the dancing bird. Well, I'm saying it's dancing, but that's a that's a word that is we created. — Yeah. I mean, that's a good question. Like, is it dancing? What is dancing? — Okay. Well, dancing is just moving in sync with the beat. — Synchronization requires you to predict when beats will land and move your body in time. One of the millions of people who saw Snowball the cockatu dancing was cognitive psychologist Anie Ruth Patel. And so he called up the owners and was like, "I'd love to run some experiments with Snowball. " He slowed down the song. And without prompting, Snowball still found the beat. — What's great about Snowball is it's not just a head bob. Like the feet get involved, too. — But when Patel sped up the song, you can see that Snowball struggled a little. He couldn't really keep up with the beat at first, but he figured out how to subdivide the beats. — Oh, yeah. He was able to do — something simpler that was still on beat. — This parrot is predicting the beats. It's able to track and synchronize just like we would.

### complex vocal learning [13:46]

— It's a hypothesis I have that something about the ability to imitate complex sounds um which we share with uh parrots but we don't share with our close genetic relatives like chimpanzees and monkeys. It's a rare trait called complex vocal learning. — There's only a few species that can do that. a bunch of these parrot type birds, elephants, seals, dolphins and whales and humans. None of the other primates can do it really. — Complex vocal learning creates certain pathways that strongly connect auditory and motor centers of the brain. — And this was a long time ago. Is this like the only individual that this has been observed in? — Great question. So, at the time, this was the first one that had been studied by science. A bunch of researchers went out and looked across YouTube and found cases where they could say, "This creature is dancing to the beat. " Basically, the animals that were going viral for this were all in this category of animals that do complex vocal learning, — except for Ronin. — Exactly. So, since then, there's been a couple cases where they've found animals that don't have complex vocal learning, but have still been able to learn to move to a metronome. the Ronin, our friend of the show, — our sea lion. — Sea lion who learned to bob her head aggressively to the beat. Some seals can do complex focal learning like a harbor seal. It's very weird cuz you could I've seen a couple videos of this and they can like mimic human — sounds like — in that family are creatures that are able to do that. So maybe they're not quite there at complex vocal learning, but they have some of the tools in the toolbox to get there. — It's possible that this vocal learning foundation that I had proposed is not a necessary foundation, but it for just the ability to do it, but it may be important for the motivation to do it. — Maybe that's what the complex vocal learning does. It gives you that little spark of reward when you follow the beat and dance to the music versus Ronin maybe is like, well, I get fish out of this. Right? Ronin is being motivated by an external factor rather than I'm listening to this groove and I've got to move my body to it.

### shallow howl [15:55]

— From the hit movie that I can't remember the name, — Star is Born. This song is in the playlist because it was used in a study of dogs. They tried changing the pitch of a dog's favorite song. When it was pitched down, the dog howled lower. — And when it was pitched up, the dog howled higher. — It doesn't feel like he's really hitting it, though. — He's not quite hitting it. But the point is, he's adjusting his sound based on the sounds he's hearing. There's even a dog that actually is pretty good at hitting. — I've seen this. Oh, — yeah. There it was. — So, they're listening and adjusting their pitch. Um, even though they don't have complex vocal learning, we think it relates to their ancestors, wolves, who howl together in packs and potentially use pitch shifting to either separate their pitches from each other to sound like a larger pack or come into alignment with uh other members of the pack to try and reunite the pack. It's less this is my jam and more, oh, we're howling. — Yeah, exactly. We're doing this together. It's part of our the thing we do as a group. And there's some theories that humans also have this in our past. — These elements of music may have had a functional origin before they then became part of this art form. — Music could have been a way of bonding, of being like, "Hey, we're on the same team. " All right, let's listen to this

### melody [17:24]

mystery song. Is this shallow? — Yeah, this is shallow again. Now, how did you recognize that song? — Well, the notes, — right? The notes. — You were able to identify this song even though this is played with completely different pitches than the original. So, this isn't in the same key. — This isn't with the same, you know, obviously it's played by a flute instead of a voice. — It's been moved to a different set of frequencies, but you're still able to recognize it. Ah, because of the relationships between the notes in the song. — No one would say if someone plays a cover and they put in a different key for their voice, oh, you're not playing the same song. You're playing a cover of the song. — Yeah. The lawyers come after you regardless, — right? What's weird is that seems to be a pretty human thing. — Oh, really? Okay. — Getting back to birds, they can't really do that. — They have very sophisticated auditory systems for processing their own songs. — You can even train some birds to recognize human songs. But if you transpose those melodies up and down to see if they continue to recognize them, they often really struggle. Humans really care about these intervals, the relationships between the different notes. That's important to us. That's what makes a melody. And we notice if

### consonance v dissonance [18:41]

those intervals sound consonant or dissonant. It's basically like, h, it sounds nice and pleasant and smooth versus rough. People often use the description of rough. They asked animals, hey, do you like consonants or dissonance? And again, it was like this total mixed bag. Some of them are able to recognize it and then a smaller subset of that actually cares. — But isn't there a lot of variation just in human cultures about how pleasing these different combinations of notes are? — That is an important thing to note with all of this. It is pretty subjective. So, for example, traditional Bulgarian music uses a lot of what I think of as dissonant intervals. — I mean, it sounds really cool. I actually really love it. — But it is sort of a more grading sound to me. — The analogy I often use is spiciness. You know, like people in different cultures may disagree on whether they like spicy food, but they may agree on what's spicy and what's not. — And is this music used in Dune? It reminds me of Dune. — I think Dune sort of invented its own thing, but it's definitely playing with the musical differences between cultures, — right? That this could feel alien to us. — That Bulgarian music feels alien to me because I didn't grow up listening to it. So, it just depends on what you're used to.

### mice & memory [20:09]

Researchers played this song for mice during the equivalent of their childhood, their adulthood, or not at all. The mice who weren't exposed to the music, and the mice who only experienced it in adulthood, preferred the silent room. But the mice who had been listening to the song when they were teens, let's say, spent more time in the music room. — In humans, early exposure starts to teach us the patterns that we'll later enjoy predicting, setting the rules for what sounds like music. I remember hearing music from a completely different culture and my feeling was I don't understand what's happening like I don't like it because what is this — or things like jazz a lot of people also don't like jazz potentially because the rules are quite different and the predictability again is harder. We're making sense of music all the time. If it doesn't make sense to us, we don't really like it. What's interesting about this in the context of understanding animals is most of these experiments are with animals that are naive to music. But a lot of the animals that you see in these viral videos of animals interacting with music obviously grew up around humans. And so I sort of this is a question I have is maybe that's a key component of this. like asking do animals like music to a bunch of animals who've never heard it before is kind of not the way to go about it. — Uh studies of pets can be very interesting and informative cuz they're exposed to music. — In one preference study, dogs whose owners regularly played classical music spent more time hanging out where they could hear that music and seemed more relaxed. You could interpret that as they've learned to love Beethoven, these dogs. But I think that the more accurate interpretation is just — Beethoven reminds them of home. — They may actually form positive associations with music because they're like, "Oh, someone's here. " — A part of our experience of music is remembering, "Oh, the first time I heard this song, I was on a road trip with my friends. " — Or even this chord progression is similar to one that I loved in a song that I loved when I was younger. — Exactly. It seems likely that some of our appreciation of music stems not just from pattern recognition, but from these kinds of associations, especially associations with emotion.

### more than a feeling [22:27]

We all know music carries emotional information. A score can change a scene. And when you remove the score entirely, the seconds I hear these strings vibrate together in this tuning, I'm happy. But by adjusting a couple pitches just slightly, the mood changes. It's a totally different feeling. — So why does music hit us in this emotional way? It's another thing that we take for granted. — But why is that? What is it? — Well, couldn't that just be associations we've learned over time, — right? One possible explanation is that's just another association. I always heard this music when I was watching a creepy movie on TV and so now it's creepy to me. — Yeah. But then why did this the director of that movie pick that music in the first place? — Right. Is it just sort of associations going all the way back or is there something deeper, something more primal?

### the cellist [23:39]

1. — In 1999, Metallica recorded a concert with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra. — We got wolves out there. — And that performance changed the life of the principal chist, David Thai. — I found the music to be very powerful, emotionally powerful. So that started me wondering why, how could that be? One theory of how music evokes emotions is it takes some of the acoustics of emotional speech and emotional vocalizations and reconfigures them to be even more stimulating than they are in their natural context. — After the Metallica concert, Tai came to embrace this theory. — We have the larynx that can lower. If we're grieved, you can have a sound like that. If you're happy, the larynx goes up. Hey, it's feels great. You know, high pure sounds like, oh, so cute. are affectionate and low harsh and I'm gonna kick your ass are threats. — Okay. So, this is this getting us back to the song I heard from the beginning? — Exactly. This is the guy the composer of the song that you listen to at the beginning of the episode. — So, right. So, his hypothesis is basically the reason that music is emotional to us is because it's playing on instinctive emotional vocalizations that all humans kind of can tap into. Then I thought, well, okay, any good theory is testable. So if I'm right about this, about the recipe, if you will, for how music is put together, I should be able to create music for some other species. — And he started with cotton top tamarind monkeys. — Tamarind monkeys have huge vocal repertoire. — Dozens of different calls. Calls for identifying food, scaring off threats, or letting others know that a threat is gone. I listened to them and I did what I usually do. I slow them down and I make musical notation. — Wow. — Exactly. Whoa. When I first heard that, I was like

### composing the song [25:46]

— so how exactly did he make this song? — If you want to create music for another species, his thought is you need to be pulling on some of those emotional associations that they have. Mhm. — But what are those emotional associations? Humans are not good at interpreting the emotional associations of other species calls. In this study, human subjects listen to isolated human vocalizations, things like laughs, sobs, screams, and moans of pleasure. And people were pretty good at rating positive sounds as positive, negative sounds as negative. But when it came to monkey noises, they had no idea. Even with a much more familiar species, domestic cats, they couldn't tell the different calls apart. We're bad at knowing the emotional veilance of these different calls. And you've got to imagine that they're also bad at interpreting our emotional veilance. So that might be a huge barrier for them enjoying our music. We're picking up on all these subtle subconscious clues that have emotional meaning in our music, but those clues are just gibberish to another species who doesn't have those same associations. — We have in our emotional communication, we have a lot of vocalizations that are they're not part of the language such as — oh, everybody knows what that means. — Mhm. But we don't have the opposite. We don't have — Mhm. — Right. So if you were we were having a conversation over lunch — and you were to say something like well you know my cousin went and I went tamarind the opposite. — They don't have but they do have. — Here's a call from a mother to a baby and slow down. David recorded a kind of melody based on this call using his cello and then he sped it up to match the tamarind's speed and register. He also added percussion. The tempo of human music is often in the range of the human heart rate, a rhythm we all heard in the womb. Tamarind's in uterero would have heard something different. — That's a fairly fast heartbeat compared to ours. And so I basically I was using just a kind of a tap So, we got this song based on the mother's calls. — It's like our lullabi. — And then another song based on threat calls. — This basically heavy metal for monkeys. — It's amazing. I wonder if these animals look at him the way we look at uh birds that mimic us. — Yeah. — He's basically just like running around, you know, mimicking these animals, right? mimicking them but also bringing the sounds that are relevant to them into these patterns which is why organiz

### the monkeys listen [28:41]

on the audience. This is in a completely different lab. They weren't set up to do these preference tests. So unfortunately we don't have like the onetoone like now do they like it? You know now do they prefer music to silence which would have been a great way to end the episode. But instead what we have is they observe their behavior. The people who were watching did not know what the experiment was about. They had just been trained to correctly and consistently tabulate the behaviors. — After hearing the threat-based music, the monkeys were more active and showed more huddling behavior. After the lullabi, they were calmer, moving less and foraging more. And after human music, they mostly didn't change their behavior at all. — They didn't give a damn about human music. Why should they care about our music? — But there was one notable exception. They also calmed down after listening to Metallicas of Wolf and Man. — What do you make of that? — It feels like I mean I think this is amazing. I'm really glad that he did it, but it sounds like we're testing for something different now. It's kind of like, can we um abstract but mimic sounds that they're already familiar with that we already know the meanings to versus um is this meaningfully different from vocalization to these animals? — Right. — Is this music? — Right. Basically, exactly. Are they interpreting this as different than just a series of sort of weird sounding calls? — Right. Are they experiencing it like we experience a song? Those are questions that are not answered by this study. The thing I'm most skeptical of is like our ability to really know what the emotional associations of these different sounds are for these animals.

### good anthropomorphizing? [30:26]

But I just love that all of this research. It forces us to consider the subjective experience of another species and how different it must be from our own. Humans have this unique blend of cognitive traits that makes music special to us. We can find reflections of some of those traits in other animals. Perhaps due to shared ancestry or shared circumstances, — we faced similar issues and came up with the same solutions. — Other animals have their own unique abilities and experiences that we can't fully fathom. Often learning incredible things about other species starts with wondering if they're like us. anthropomorphizing. So, attributing human qualities to animals is not necessarily bad. We have to do it carefully. But in, for example, the story that you were just telling me about this fox and how it got you into this question in the first place. I think that's lovely. And it's because you were anthropomorphizing that you decided to follow this question further. That's empathy right there. Part of the reason we do it is because it allows us to empathize with another creature. — The most magical time of all was after that video. the foxes actually put their den in our yard — um just out of sight, but you know, we'd walk over there and there were six fox kits. So, that was just so incredible to see. And it's undeniable that there is a connection there. If you like Howtown, the best way to support our little team is to join our Patreon where we've got adree episodes, bonus videos, and we host a monthly science paper book club. Special thanks this episode to Andy Thorne, whose band Leftover Salmon plays all over, and David Tai, who has a full album of music composed for cats. Finally, thanks to my wonderful mother who recorded the flute music you heard.