September 24, 2025 • 34 mins
What's an animal's favorite song? And can music make them feel better? Jorge talks to three experts who play music to animals.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Hey, welcome to Sign Stuff, a production of iHeartRadio. I'm
Hoorheit Champ, and today we're tackling the question can animals
appreciate music?
Speaker 2 (00:10):
Now?
Speaker 1 (00:11):
This is a special episode because we're going to talk
to three people who play music for animals, but to
each do it for a different reason. We're going to
talk to an artist who sings to exotic animals to
make online videos, an animal well for a specialist who
works in the meat industry, and a psychologist who's interested
in the musicality of animals. To bring your pets along
(00:33):
and home tune with us as we answer the question
can animals appreciate music?
Speaker 3 (00:43):
Well?
Speaker 1 (00:45):
Hey, everyone, all right. The first person we're talking to
today is a musician who's known for posting videos where
he sings to animals. If you spend time on social media,
chances are you've seen Lauris, Aesadian who goes by the
artist's name Plumes, playing a guitar outside in a farm
or a field, singing to cows, parrots, lamas, mirkats, pandas,
(01:08):
and even to raffs.
Speaker 4 (01:12):
Las Plumes his.
Speaker 1 (01:20):
Videos get millions of views, and his Instagram account, Plumes Official,
has over a million followers. My biggest question for Plumes
was do the animals actually react to his music? Well,
thank you so much, mister Assadian for joining us.
Speaker 5 (01:36):
Of course, thanks for having me.
Speaker 1 (01:37):
Can you please tell us who you are and what
you do.
Speaker 5 (01:40):
Yeah, so I'm a singer. I'm a French singer and
my artist's name is prim and I sing for a
pretty unusual crowd, I would say, because it's animals, and yeah,
I've been doing this for awhile.
Speaker 2 (01:50):
Now.
Speaker 1 (01:51):
Yeah, you push your videos on Instagram.
Speaker 5 (01:53):
Exactly, Yeah, on pretty much all social media platforms.
Speaker 1 (01:56):
Why did you start playing music for animals?
Speaker 5 (01:59):
Well, I've found out that carols like music over three
years ago now, so naturally I want to try it
out for myself, being a musician and at the time
I was living in the countryside with my grandma, so
there's lots of cals around, so it was the perfect
opportunity for me, and so I went in there. I
was pretty scared at first.
Speaker 1 (02:17):
Were you afraid that they would do harm to you
or that they wouldn't like your music?
Speaker 5 (02:21):
I guess both that they wouldn't like my music, so
they would do harm to me as a replication of
the thing. But there's giants, so I guess it can
be a bit overwhelming. And they're also very curious, so
they will come running towards you and you don't know
if they're going to stop or not. So I was
a bit scared. Now I'm not scared at all. Even
though you have to be careful with animals sometimes you
(02:42):
have to respect the boundaries and stuff. But yeah, now
I'm not scared.
Speaker 3 (02:46):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (02:47):
How do animals typically react to you playing music for them?
Speaker 5 (02:50):
Well, they pretty much all want to get closer to
the music and investigate what the music is all about.
Some of them even like rub their heads against me
or try to have a contact, and others they just
stay around to listen to music and it can last
sometimes up to an hour.
Speaker 1 (03:08):
Do you see them react to the specific songs, because
I know sometimes in the video it seems like they're
dancing to the music.
Speaker 2 (03:14):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (03:15):
Sometimes, and some animals like parrots, have a sense of
rhythm and they will start dancing in rhythm to the
music and sometimes singing along and stuff like this.
Speaker 1 (03:24):
Any other interesting reactions that you've noticed.
Speaker 5 (03:27):
Mostly surprises, I would say, because there are some animals
that you didn't expect to come close because they're wild,
like the okps. I sang for an okp and I
was warned before that nothing is going to happen, basically
like you can try anyways, but it's not worth it
in a way. And I went in there anyways, and
he came right against me to listen to music for
(03:47):
like an hour, all right.
Speaker 1 (03:49):
If you look at Plumes's account Plumes of VCL, you
see videos of them playing music to cows, goats, puppies, cats, pigs,
mini pigs, horses, parrots, capybaras, meerkats, copies, elephants, giraffes, donkeys, deer, sheep, lemurs, flamingos, tapiers, owls, pandas, penguins, camels, rhinoceroses, gibbons, seals, raccoons, tigers,
(04:15):
oh my. And in the videos you'll see the animals
appear to react to his music playing. The animals will
often come up to Plumes and we're curious or interested
in the music. There's one video where he plays a
Lady Gaga song to a white tiger and the tiger
seems to come over and sit down to listen. Or
in another video, he plays an Oasis song to some
(04:38):
orangutans and the orangutans not only come over to listen,
but one of them starts to clap, which made me
wonder what kind of music does each animal like to hear?
So in your videos you've sung Green Day to puppies,
Bruno Mars to horses, the Beatles to donkeys, Katie Perry
(04:59):
to flamingos. How do you pick the music to sing
to each animal?
Speaker 5 (05:02):
Well, if there's a little nod or a little wink
to like a species, I like to choose that song.
I will play three Little Birds for parrots or things
like this, you know, But usually it's mostly like love
songs because I feel like the intent is very important
and somehow they can feel the intent that you're putting
out there.
Speaker 1 (05:19):
So what has been your favorite animal to play for
so far?
Speaker 5 (05:23):
I would say the rhinos because it was like the
most powerful expanse in a way, because once again we
were told that they might not approach and they ended
up being like right against me. I was on top
of a rock for safety issues, and we thought they
couldn't reach that rock. Turns out they could, and yeah,
they kind of touch me with their arms. It was
(05:44):
a bit dangerous this time. I'm not gonna lie, but
it was so powerful and we all like to de
season once in a lifetime moment for us.
Speaker 1 (05:51):
So they did react to the music.
Speaker 5 (05:53):
Yeah, yeah, they were very curious. And we even came
back the next day and the same thing happened.
Speaker 1 (05:58):
And so they seemed to generally react to the music.
Speaker 3 (06:00):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (06:01):
Yeah, a lot of people don't want to see that
animals are sensitive so that they would come anyways no
matter what. But turns out when well, there are twenty
minutes beforehand to set up the cameras and the mics
and stuff, and the animals don't come, and it's only
when the music stells that they end upcoming her. So
it's interesting to reat us.
Speaker 1 (06:18):
Oh wow, Now I know what you're thinking. This doesn't
sound very scientific, and it's not. We're going to talk
to two scientists later in the program who do academic
research on the connections between animals and music. But what's
interesting about these videos is not how the animals react
to the music, but how one specific animal reacts to
(06:41):
the videos themselves. Well, I think the most interesting animal
reaction you have to your videos is from people. Yeah,
let me read you a couple of comments. I saw
somebody said, your videos make me look and feel animals
in a way that is totally new for me. And
that's if you sort of echo what you said the
(07:01):
first time you did this. What do you think is
happening to people who see these videos of you playing
to animals?
Speaker 5 (07:07):
Yeah, I guess if I can make people click the
same way clicked for me when I first met animals,
it's great, you know, because I don't want to be
like telling people what to do, so I guess I
just put my videos online and people take what they
want from it. Like a lot of times, people tell me, yeah,
I stopped teaching meat since I first started watching your wids,
and that means a lot to me if I can
(07:28):
have a positive impact on the animal world.
Speaker 1 (07:31):
When you said something click, what do you mean by that?
Speaker 5 (07:33):
Well, for me, I stopped teaching meat today I met animals,
so there's definitely something that clicks for me. I was like,
how can I think for a cow in the afternoon
and then at night itter s.
Speaker 3 (07:44):
Tech or whatever.
Speaker 1 (07:46):
Somebody also said you are such a bright, beautiful spot
in a troubled world. Thank you for creating a bridge
between humans and animals.
Speaker 5 (07:54):
That's very kay. I feel like It might sound a
little bit boomer, but I feel like maybe we lost
touch on generation with nature, and so maybe it feels
good for people to get that back, to see people
hanging out with animals. I think it can definitely feel
even powerful and soothing for people to watch.
Speaker 1 (08:12):
Yeah, a lot of people mention that we're living in
very troubled times.
Speaker 5 (08:15):
I know I have a lot of American people following me,
and I don't know much about politics and stuff, but
I guess it's not the best right now. I don't
really know, So if I can help to make them
feel a little bit better, that's great.
Speaker 1 (08:28):
All right. So we have a first send account someone
who's played music to penguins, seals, drafts, and all kinds
of animals, and he reports that animals in general do
reactive with music and seem genuinely curious about it. Next,
we're going to talk to scientists who's done something similar
to plumes, but in a scientific setting. She's played music
(08:49):
to pigs to figure out what kind of music they
like to listen to and whether or not music can
make pigs feel emotions. We'll dig into that, but first
I should tell tell you about a terrible idea I had.
Is there anything that you would like to tell folks
out there?
Speaker 3 (09:07):
Yeah?
Speaker 5 (09:07):
Yes, So a lot of people are afraid to copy
my VIDs when they go and sing for animals. And
I would say, if you've seen make it, honestly, it's
so nice. If I can inspire people to do the
same thing, I won't take it badly at all. So
if you're a musician and you want to try it out,
please do.
Speaker 1 (09:23):
Oh great, I might try it out for this episode.
Speaker 3 (09:26):
All nice?
Speaker 5 (09:26):
Did you play music?
Speaker 1 (09:27):
I play a little piano and a little bit of guitar,
but I'm a terrible singer. I think that might be
the problem, but.
Speaker 5 (09:33):
I don't think they care, honestly, can't the least judge
the audience that I've had.
Speaker 1 (09:38):
Stay with us, We'll be right back, Welcome back. All right.
We're answering the question can animals appreciate music? And we
just heard from a musician play music for animals ranging
from giraffes to pandas, and according to him, the animals
(10:01):
do react, or at least they seem treious. So another
question is is this really true? Do animals have an actual
emotional reaction when you play human music for them? To
answer this question, I talk to someone who does research
in animal welfare, Professor Maria Camilla Sevaios.
Speaker 2 (10:20):
I am Maria Camilla Sevadius, and I am Associate Professor
of Animal Welfare and Behavior at the University of Calgary.
I am a researcher and specifically my research focus in
finding strategies to improve the quality of life of animals,
especially captive animals. One of the research lines which I
have started is in a strong collaboration with doctor Erardo Rodriguez,
(10:42):
is identifying music as a possible environmental enrichment.
Speaker 1 (10:47):
What is this idea of using music for animal welfare?
Speaker 2 (10:51):
When we have captive animals, there are different strategies to
improve their welfare. Right, One way to improve their welfare
is giving them some environmental such as give them control
of the environment where they are or make that environment better.
Music is and now it is environment talentca so we
(11:11):
can use different kinds of sounds to improve the environment.
Speaker 3 (11:14):
Where they are.
Speaker 1 (11:15):
I guess what do we know about how animals respond
to music?
Speaker 2 (11:19):
In animals, there is a lot of studies demonstrating that
different species of animals they react to music. They change
behaviors depending on the quality of the music or the
type of music that you put they will react right.
Speaker 1 (11:36):
According to doctors Valius, there have been many studies that
have looked at how animals react to music. Scientists have
cleared music to gorillas, chimpanzees, sparrows, elephants, cows, and dogs,
to somewhat mixed results. Some studies find that the animals
do react while others don't, and usually the studies use
(11:58):
classical music. For example, a scientists have tested whether classical
music makes guerrillas less anxious. It does, or whether it
helps dogs sleep better. It does. In one study, scientists
from the University of twelf tested whether country music made
cows want to be milk more it does. It all
(12:19):
makes doctor Sivaias and her colleagues wonder if the type
of music played to pigs made a difference.
Speaker 2 (12:27):
For example, we did a study in collaboration with doctor
Bernardo from the University of Antiochia and Juliana who was
the first author of this was her PhD.
Speaker 3 (12:37):
Study.
Speaker 2 (12:38):
We wanted to see first if pigs will react to
music right, and second, after we identified if they react
or not, what kind of music they like. More So Bernardo,
he is a musician so he created different kinds of
music where he knew all this spectro temporal characteristic of
the music. So, for example, number of instruments the high
(12:59):
frank and see contained the amplitude, the same troid desonance
right the spectral devia.
Speaker 3 (13:05):
So there are a lot.
Speaker 2 (13:06):
Of different things that you know as a musician that
you have the information.
Speaker 1 (13:12):
Doctor Sibaias and her colleagues wanted to know what kind
of music pigs react to. So they created music pieces
that had different properties, how complex it is, what frequencies
it had, and specifically they varied something called consonants. Now
I'm not a musician, but the idea is that a
certain combination of notes seem more pleasant to us than others.
(13:34):
There's no exact definition, and it's all a bit subjective.
But for example, in Western tradition, this combination of notes
is considered consonant, whereas this combination is considered dissonant. Now
(13:57):
here's an example of consonant music. The scientists played the pigs.
Here's an example of the dissonant music they played. And
(14:22):
at the same time, while of the music was playing,
doctor Sebaias and her colleagues measured the pig's emotions.
Speaker 2 (14:29):
So we use a specific indicator called qualitative behavior assessment,
which allows us to assess emotions.
Speaker 1 (14:37):
How does this work.
Speaker 2 (14:39):
This is a broad indicator where you have different terms, right,
such as for example, comfortable, stress, fearful, and there are
around twenty terms. Then you have a visual and analogical scale.
You observe the animal independent on how the animal interacts
with the environment, and you will give in that analogical scale. Okay,
(15:01):
I think this animal is happy, it's playful, it's comfortable,
or noise is stress, is fearful or things like that.
Speaker 1 (15:09):
I see. This is a person with a paper observing
the animal and then rating all of these different adjectives correct.
Speaker 2 (15:16):
And that allows us to identify how is the emotion
of the animal in terms of that specific situation.
Speaker 1 (15:23):
All right, here's the experiment. There's two parts. In the first,
the scientists played music with different characteristics to a group
of pigs and observed how the pigs reacted based on
a scale of emotions.
Speaker 2 (15:35):
From there, we identified, for example, that pigs they negatively react.
Speaker 1 (15:40):
To this music.
Speaker 2 (15:42):
If you put this on a music that will generate fear,
they will generate the stress, but consonant music will generate
like positive emotions such as play such as happy.
Speaker 1 (15:53):
So, yeah, if you found the consonant notes in music
I played for you pleasant and the dissonant music notes unpleasant,
so the pigs they have the same reaction to the
music you and I have, okay. And then the second
part of the experiment they use the music pigs like
the consonant music as a form of therapy.
Speaker 2 (16:14):
And then the next step was using that music that
we identified like that is spectro te characteristic music that
we identified that actually they were reacting better. It was
compared with pigs that did not receive any stimulus.
Speaker 1 (16:28):
Here, the pigs were split into two groups. For one
group of pigs, the scientists would play the consonant music
at different times during the day, and for the other group,
they wouldn't play them any music at all. And then
they measured two things, how the pigs behaved and also
their levels of cortsol, which is a stress hormone.
Speaker 2 (16:50):
Wholly unidentified that for example, pigs that received the music,
they would cope better with the environment in terms of
she evaliated behavioral characteristics and also physiological characteristics. Right, so
those big lids that received the environmental enrichment. Physiologically, they
had a better pattern. They are less.
Speaker 1 (17:10):
Stress okay, somehow Okay, So to recap the found, picks
seem to have an emotional reaction to different kinds of music,
and that plain for them, the music that made them
exhibit more positive emotions lowered their stress level. Okay, So
then your study and other studies have shown that animals
(17:31):
have an emotional response to music. Is that true?
Speaker 2 (17:35):
Well, so we speak about emotions, right. Other studies have
mostly focused on other indicators such as behavior or they
have physiological indicators that demonstrates that they are coping better.
But specific studies speaking about these generates emotions. We still
(17:55):
need to work and continue and trying to find emotions
to identify to evaluid emotions. It's difficult, right, Animals won't
tell you, oh, I feel good.
Speaker 1 (18:04):
Right right? Well, what do you think was happening then
in the pig's brain when you played the music that
they seem to respond better to.
Speaker 2 (18:13):
So, pigs they are extremely similar to humans, right, They
work physiologically, very very similar to us. So they have
all these structures in the brain that allows them to
process that sense, all the stimus so they will hear it,
it will enter, it will be processed in the year,
and then it will go through the ipotala mus and
(18:36):
it will go through the tiling cephalo. I would assume
that the process of the music would be pretty similar
to the process of music we have in humans, but
we don't know right there.
Speaker 1 (18:46):
Is a lack of studies on that. This princess to
the main question of the episode. What's going on in
the animals' brain when it hears music? Can they actually
appreciate it? To find out, we're going to talk to
a neuroscientists studies the brains of animals to figure out
if they have something called musicality. Stay with us, you're
(19:08):
listening to science stuff. Welcome back. We're answering the question
can animals appreciate music? And here we get to the
heart of the matter, or should I say the brain
of the matter. In the last two segments, we confirm
(19:31):
that animals react to music and that they seem to
have an emotional response to different kinds of music. Now
we'll get to the question do they really appreciate music?
To answer that, I talk to a cognitive neuroscientist who's
been studying the musicality of animals. Well, thank you doctor
Raviani for joining us.
Speaker 3 (19:52):
Thank you very much for having me. Can you please
tell us who you are and what do you do. Yes,
my name is Andre Ravignani. I am a researcher and
a professor at the Department of Human Neurosciences at Sapienza
University of Roman and also honorary professor at the Center
for Music in the Brain in Als in Denmark, which
is probably one of the few places in the world
where the study of neuroscience and music are combined.
Speaker 1 (20:14):
So can you explain to us what is biomusicology.
Speaker 3 (20:17):
It's a term that has been used a lot in
recent years to denote a biological approach to music, or
better a biological approach to musicality. And this is a
very important distinction. To make music is the you know,
the cultural artifact, the object of study of many fields
of humanities and arts. While musicality is defined as the
(20:40):
set of skills that allows us to produce, perceive music,
to move in time to music, and so on and
so forth. Musicality is more the set of psychological, cognitive,
biological building blocks that makes us musical animals.
Speaker 1 (20:55):
And so you do this by comparing humans and animals exactly.
Speaker 3 (20:59):
Our general approaches not to play Mozart to teenagers and
to cows and to see what effect it has on
their behavior. Our approach is to distill the building blocks
of musicality.
Speaker 1 (21:12):
Doctor Ravinani studies the musicality of animals, which is basically
the ability to understand music, and these published papers about
disability and seals, chimpanzees, squirrel, monkeys, penguins, whales, dogs, dolphins,
rangutans and other animals. Now, according to doctor Ravinani, musicality
(21:32):
can be broken down into a set of skills that
some animals seem to have and others don't.
Speaker 3 (21:41):
So, for instance, one of those is bit perceptions. For instance,
when we go to a club and we dance and
we're moving time to music, then we recruit these fairly
complex and neural capacity to moving time and to predict
the next bit. Other traits are vocal learning, so learning
sounds that do not belong to your natural repertoire learning
sounds that are not innate. You can think about absolute
(22:01):
and relative pitch. So imagine I play happy Birthday to you,
or imagine yeah, all the human beings singing happy birthday
to you, They're not always starting from the same note.
So I start from a sea and you start from
a C sharp. It's just the same melody, but presposed
of a semi tone, and to us it sounds exactly
the same unless you have absolute pitch. One related to
(22:23):
rhythm is meter perception. Another one is percussive behavior, and
there are many more.
Speaker 1 (22:28):
Right according to doctor Ravinyanni, there's a list of skills that,
put together, add up to an ability to perceive, understand,
and make music, in other words, to appreciate music. So
now the question is do animals have these skills. We'll
start with deep perception.
Speaker 3 (22:49):
Big perception is a very complex ability underlying our musicality,
and if we think about it for seconds, to us,
it seems natural to moving time to music. However, neurally
and psychologically, the process of bait perception is extremely complex
because music is not a metrino. It's a complex stream
of sounds. So the first thing that our brain needs
(23:09):
to do is to extract a recurring beat. So basically
we impose our expectations when is the next beat gonna come?
Speaker 1 (23:18):
So recognizing a beat is not that simple, but from
studies of human brains. Scientists knew that beat perception was
related to talking or vocalizing because they share some of
the same brain areas, and sure enough, one of the
first animals beat perception was found in where parrots.
Speaker 3 (23:40):
A study on a dancing parrot snowballed the cockatool showed
that actually, yeah, we have a second data point. So
the parrot was dancing in timed music and then speeding
up or slowing down depending on the bpm of the song,
and so on and so forth.
Speaker 1 (23:54):
So parrots can keep a beat, and apparently sil can
sea lions and seals. Twenty thirteen, Ronan, the sea lion,
became famous as the only non human mammal known that
could keep a beat. Scientists started training Ronan when the
animal was only three years old to bob its head
to a beat, and just this year, the scientists showed
(24:16):
that Ronan could keep a beat as well or better
than humans. This is also something that doctor Gravignani has
studied with seals.
Speaker 3 (24:28):
We did so called playback experiments where we broadcasted rhythmic
sounds of other seals to specific individual seals, and we
saw when they responded to the coal. So did they
respond to the sound in time with it, in synchrony
with it, and we found that in the harbor seals
they synchronized with the delay but very regularly, and they
(24:48):
adapt the bpm depending on the bpm of.
Speaker 1 (24:51):
The sound, meaning they can tense the beat.
Speaker 3 (24:53):
We need to do more research before we can say
that harbor seals can sense the beat, but definitely they
have some capacities to synchroniz eyes.
Speaker 1 (25:01):
Another musicality skill that's been found in animals is perfect pitch.
Speaker 3 (25:07):
That has been tested in quite a few bird species.
Birds so that they're very good at picking individual sounds,
so they have absolute pitch, something that is very rare
in humans, so they can recognize, okay, this is four
hundred herds, this is for fifty, for twenty, even without
being given a reference pitch.
Speaker 1 (25:23):
And another skill is the ability to tell half notes
from quarter notes.
Speaker 3 (25:30):
There is this integer ratio, a feature where you know,
if you think about we will rock you stompstonm clup,
stomp storm clup, so you have one unit of time
going from the first step to the second stone, and
then from the club to the next stomp. It's exactly
two units of time. And this produces some so called integeration.
This integer ratio we found in the injury lemurs of Madagascar.
(25:52):
So my colleagues at the University of Turin have been
recording their spontaneous vocalizations of these limours for about twenty years,
and based on this very large chorpus of limour songs,
we have seen that that's the first case of a
mammal that they are not humans that can produce this, meaning.
Speaker 1 (26:09):
That they use the quarter note and the half note.
Is that kind of what you mean? Yeah, exactly, So
lemurs can keep track of half and quarter notes. Finally,
another skilled musicality, singing together, has also been found in animals.
Speaker 3 (26:26):
Another interesting building blocks of music is the capacity for
vocal joint action or for vocal coordination. So gibbondes are apes.
They're the one apes the farthest away from us, but
they are still apes. They're not monkeys. And they sing
in duets. Right, So a male and a female will
pay a bond for a long while and they sing
to each other in a duet where some notes overlap
(26:46):
and some don't. And what we have seen is they
coordinate their song. Sometimes males do solos, sometimes males singing
a duet and if we compare the rhythm of their
song in a solo or in a duet, we see
a star difference between the two. So we see that
when the male sings in a duet, his notes are
much more adjusted and predictable to coordinate with the female.
(27:08):
This kind of vocal coordination that we deploy when we
sing in a choir or in many other contexts.
Speaker 1 (27:12):
It's the ability to listen and then adapt your own
music production.
Speaker 3 (27:17):
Yeah, your own vocal production.
Speaker 1 (27:19):
Interesting. So we've seen that in the animal kingdom.
Speaker 3 (27:22):
Indeed very often in singing privates and also in birds.
Speaker 1 (27:26):
Now there are musicality skills that haven't been found in animals.
For example, the ability to recognize a melody even if
you play it on a different scale. That's called led
transposition or meter, which is recognizing patterns or groupings and
beats haven't been seen in any animal. But doctor Ramniani
argies that doesn't mean animals can't do it. It just
(27:49):
means we need to keep looking.
Speaker 3 (27:52):
They take on messages that for every musicality trade. Every
time someone says, I reckon that this musicality building block
is unique human, then a few years later someone finds
a species that also has that traite, right, So it
particularly goes like that. So I think the take on
message of all these research until now is that even
though the full package of these musicality traits might be
(28:14):
uniquely human, for each trait we can find at least
another animal species that has it, so we are not
so unique after all.
Speaker 1 (28:22):
All right, So the components of understanding and appreciating music
have been found in different animals, but to date humans
seem to be the only species with all the skills.
Now what does that mean for our main question? So
if someone were to ask you, do you think animals
can appreciate music? How would you answer that question?
Speaker 3 (28:44):
I think the short answer to that that we really
do not know. I think that the first question to
ask is do they even care about it? So carrying
and appreciating music is a bit of an anthropocentric perspective
in a way, because for us it's such an important thing.
And then on top of that, music is the human
cultural artifact. Right would you enjoy listening for hours of
(29:06):
dolphin whistles or chimpanzee drumming? There are animal signals, animal sounds,
communicative sounds.
Speaker 1 (29:13):
But it sounds like we have found some musicality in
some species. It is the question, then, can you connect
that musicality to feelings for some sort of reaction.
Speaker 3 (29:22):
Yes, potentially some music sounds and no music sounds can
have some emotional value for different species. But this has
to do with more basic sound perception rather than music
per se.
Speaker 1 (29:33):
I see. So the answer might be that they might
be able to appreciate music, but probably not human music.
Speaker 3 (29:39):
Yeah, potentially species specific music. Actually, some colleagues in the
US have been working towards trying to understand whether we
can make species specific music. So there are even albums
out there on iTunes of cat music, and the peer
reviewed studies where they showed that you know, this cat
specific music played by a cello in used relaxation in cats,
(29:59):
and so on and so forth.
Speaker 1 (30:00):
Okay, last question. The first part of this episode, I
told the musician who plays music for animals, I was
going to try it, and I'm terrible and I don't
think very well, but I'm gonna try to sing to
some animals, maybe a dog or a cat. How do
you think that dog or cat is going to react?
Speaker 3 (30:14):
So, first of all, it depends on the species. So
a cat and a dog have already a very different
perceptual and cognitive world one from one another. Right, How
they see the world and how they feel the world
as we know is very different, right, even between breeds
of dogs. And then it also depends a lot on
the experiences that that cat or dog has done during
their life. Right, so you know, imagine that the dog
(30:37):
was raised by an owner.
Speaker 4 (30:39):
That we always think we don't really high pitch to
convey that, come on here, cuties, Or imagine that the
dog was mistreated by someone with a very deep noise
like that, And then if you hit some.
Speaker 3 (30:52):
Low notes, the dog is not going to have a
very good reaction, right, And then who knows? Again, I
don't explve the fact that many animals might be enjoying music,
our own music, their own music, but we still don't
know enough I see, Right, So if you pay music
to a catera dog, they either won't care or they
will react based on what those sounds have been associated
(31:13):
with in the past. And don't get me wrong, and
not belittling animals, I love animals. What I'm saying is
that their cognitive and perceptual world is very complex and
nuance like our own, and so the music that you're
going to play or sing is the result of a
bunch of cultural accumulation, and that probably not all the
nuances we see in them are gonna speak to them,
(31:33):
and vice versa.
Speaker 1 (31:35):
All right, So to recap the whole episode, animals seem
to react to music. They can have what seems like
an emotional response to it. For example, you can play
music that lowers their stress level. And many species seem
to have the brain circuits to do single musical tasks
like keep a beat or tell notes apart or sing together.
(31:56):
But whether they can appreciate music might depend whether they
can even hear the sounds in that music and what
their life experience has been with those sounds. It's just
like how we don't necessarily appreciate a bird song, or
how some of us don't like heavy metal or country
music or music from another culture. All right, I'll leave
(32:26):
you with the image a man with a guitar in
a field playing music to an eight foot tall bird.
Here's Plumes singing a song. Hey road to an Ostrich.
Thanks for joining us, See you next time you've been
(32:58):
listening to science Stuffduction of iHeartRadio Bringing the produced by
me or hitch Ham prendedate by Rose Seguda, executive producer
Jerry Rowland, and audio engineer and mixer Kasey Pecrom. You
can follow me on social media. Just search for PhD
Comics and the name of your favorite platform. Be sure
to subscribe to sign stuff on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
(33:20):
or wherever you get your podcasts, and please tell your friends.
We'll be back next Wednesday with another episode. All right, today,
I'm singing for Chloe the Dog and Mango the Cat. Chloe,
you Mango, Here we go. It had to be. It
(33:42):
had to be. I wandered averund fine, elly fan soundbody
who's yeah? I don't think they care. You don't seem
that impressed. What are the animals doing?
Speaker 2 (34:04):
What was the Mango?
Speaker 1 (34:06):
The cat went behind you and we started just kind
of like laying out and stretching out, and so I
think he was definitely listening.
Speaker 3 (34:13):
For sure, he comes and listens when I played the guitar.
She won't really hang out with me in here, but
he will all come and.
Speaker 2 (34:19):
Play the guitar and he'll sit on the couch or
he'll just lay on the carpet next to me
Speaker 1 (34:22):
And he'll just hang out so he does that her
not so much, but he definitely does
Hey, welcome to Sign Stuff, a production of iHeartRadio. I'm
Hoorheit Champ, and today we're tackling the question can animals
appreciate music?
Speaker 2 (00:10):
Now?
Speaker 1 (00:11):
This is a special episode because we're going to talk
to three people who play music for animals, but to
each do it for a different reason. We're going to
talk to an artist who sings to exotic animals to
make online videos, an animal well for a specialist who
works in the meat industry, and a psychologist who's interested
in the musicality of animals. To bring your pets along
(00:33):
and home tune with us as we answer the question
can animals appreciate music?
Speaker 3 (00:43):
Well?
Speaker 1 (00:45):
Hey, everyone, all right. The first person we're talking to
today is a musician who's known for posting videos where
he sings to animals. If you spend time on social media,
chances are you've seen Lauris, Aesadian who goes by the
artist's name Plumes, playing a guitar outside in a farm
or a field, singing to cows, parrots, lamas, mirkats, pandas,
(01:08):
and even to raffs.
Speaker 4 (01:12):
Las Plumes his.
Speaker 1 (01:20):
Videos get millions of views, and his Instagram account, Plumes Official,
has over a million followers. My biggest question for Plumes
was do the animals actually react to his music? Well,
thank you so much, mister Assadian for joining us.
Speaker 5 (01:36):
Of course, thanks for having me.
Speaker 1 (01:37):
Can you please tell us who you are and what
you do.
Speaker 5 (01:40):
Yeah, so I'm a singer. I'm a French singer and
my artist's name is prim and I sing for a
pretty unusual crowd, I would say, because it's animals, and yeah,
I've been doing this for awhile.
Speaker 2 (01:50):
Now.
Speaker 1 (01:51):
Yeah, you push your videos on Instagram.
Speaker 5 (01:53):
Exactly, Yeah, on pretty much all social media platforms.
Speaker 1 (01:56):
Why did you start playing music for animals?
Speaker 5 (01:59):
Well, I've found out that carols like music over three
years ago now, so naturally I want to try it
out for myself, being a musician and at the time
I was living in the countryside with my grandma, so
there's lots of cals around, so it was the perfect
opportunity for me, and so I went in there. I
was pretty scared at first.
Speaker 1 (02:17):
Were you afraid that they would do harm to you
or that they wouldn't like your music?
Speaker 5 (02:21):
I guess both that they wouldn't like my music, so
they would do harm to me as a replication of
the thing. But there's giants, so I guess it can
be a bit overwhelming. And they're also very curious, so
they will come running towards you and you don't know
if they're going to stop or not. So I was
a bit scared. Now I'm not scared at all. Even
though you have to be careful with animals sometimes you
(02:42):
have to respect the boundaries and stuff. But yeah, now
I'm not scared.
Speaker 3 (02:46):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (02:47):
How do animals typically react to you playing music for them?
Speaker 5 (02:50):
Well, they pretty much all want to get closer to
the music and investigate what the music is all about.
Some of them even like rub their heads against me
or try to have a contact, and others they just
stay around to listen to music and it can last
sometimes up to an hour.
Speaker 1 (03:08):
Do you see them react to the specific songs, because
I know sometimes in the video it seems like they're
dancing to the music.
Speaker 2 (03:14):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (03:15):
Sometimes, and some animals like parrots, have a sense of
rhythm and they will start dancing in rhythm to the
music and sometimes singing along and stuff like this.
Speaker 1 (03:24):
Any other interesting reactions that you've noticed.
Speaker 5 (03:27):
Mostly surprises, I would say, because there are some animals
that you didn't expect to come close because they're wild,
like the okps. I sang for an okp and I
was warned before that nothing is going to happen, basically
like you can try anyways, but it's not worth it
in a way. And I went in there anyways, and
he came right against me to listen to music for
(03:47):
like an hour, all right.
Speaker 1 (03:49):
If you look at Plumes's account Plumes of VCL, you
see videos of them playing music to cows, goats, puppies, cats, pigs,
mini pigs, horses, parrots, capybaras, meerkats, copies, elephants, giraffes, donkeys, deer, sheep, lemurs, flamingos, tapiers, owls, pandas, penguins, camels, rhinoceroses, gibbons, seals, raccoons, tigers,
(04:15):
oh my. And in the videos you'll see the animals
appear to react to his music playing. The animals will
often come up to Plumes and we're curious or interested
in the music. There's one video where he plays a
Lady Gaga song to a white tiger and the tiger
seems to come over and sit down to listen. Or
in another video, he plays an Oasis song to some
(04:38):
orangutans and the orangutans not only come over to listen,
but one of them starts to clap, which made me
wonder what kind of music does each animal like to hear?
So in your videos you've sung Green Day to puppies,
Bruno Mars to horses, the Beatles to donkeys, Katie Perry
(04:59):
to flamingos. How do you pick the music to sing
to each animal?
Speaker 5 (05:02):
Well, if there's a little nod or a little wink
to like a species, I like to choose that song.
I will play three Little Birds for parrots or things
like this, you know, But usually it's mostly like love
songs because I feel like the intent is very important
and somehow they can feel the intent that you're putting
out there.
Speaker 1 (05:19):
So what has been your favorite animal to play for
so far?
Speaker 5 (05:23):
I would say the rhinos because it was like the
most powerful expanse in a way, because once again we
were told that they might not approach and they ended
up being like right against me. I was on top
of a rock for safety issues, and we thought they
couldn't reach that rock. Turns out they could, and yeah,
they kind of touch me with their arms. It was
(05:44):
a bit dangerous this time. I'm not gonna lie, but
it was so powerful and we all like to de
season once in a lifetime moment for us.
Speaker 1 (05:51):
So they did react to the music.
Speaker 5 (05:53):
Yeah, yeah, they were very curious. And we even came
back the next day and the same thing happened.
Speaker 1 (05:58):
And so they seemed to generally react to the music.
Speaker 3 (06:00):
Yeah.
Speaker 5 (06:01):
Yeah, a lot of people don't want to see that
animals are sensitive so that they would come anyways no
matter what. But turns out when well, there are twenty
minutes beforehand to set up the cameras and the mics
and stuff, and the animals don't come, and it's only
when the music stells that they end upcoming her. So
it's interesting to reat us.
Speaker 1 (06:18):
Oh wow, Now I know what you're thinking. This doesn't
sound very scientific, and it's not. We're going to talk
to two scientists later in the program who do academic
research on the connections between animals and music. But what's
interesting about these videos is not how the animals react
to the music, but how one specific animal reacts to
(06:41):
the videos themselves. Well, I think the most interesting animal
reaction you have to your videos is from people. Yeah,
let me read you a couple of comments. I saw
somebody said, your videos make me look and feel animals
in a way that is totally new for me. And
that's if you sort of echo what you said the
(07:01):
first time you did this. What do you think is
happening to people who see these videos of you playing
to animals?
Speaker 5 (07:07):
Yeah, I guess if I can make people click the
same way clicked for me when I first met animals,
it's great, you know, because I don't want to be
like telling people what to do, so I guess I
just put my videos online and people take what they
want from it. Like a lot of times, people tell me, yeah,
I stopped teaching meat since I first started watching your wids,
and that means a lot to me if I can
(07:28):
have a positive impact on the animal world.
Speaker 1 (07:31):
When you said something click, what do you mean by that?
Speaker 5 (07:33):
Well, for me, I stopped teaching meat today I met animals,
so there's definitely something that clicks for me. I was like,
how can I think for a cow in the afternoon
and then at night itter s.
Speaker 3 (07:44):
Tech or whatever.
Speaker 1 (07:46):
Somebody also said you are such a bright, beautiful spot
in a troubled world. Thank you for creating a bridge
between humans and animals.
Speaker 5 (07:54):
That's very kay. I feel like It might sound a
little bit boomer, but I feel like maybe we lost
touch on generation with nature, and so maybe it feels
good for people to get that back, to see people
hanging out with animals. I think it can definitely feel
even powerful and soothing for people to watch.
Speaker 1 (08:12):
Yeah, a lot of people mention that we're living in
very troubled times.
Speaker 5 (08:15):
I know I have a lot of American people following me,
and I don't know much about politics and stuff, but
I guess it's not the best right now. I don't
really know, So if I can help to make them
feel a little bit better, that's great.
Speaker 1 (08:28):
All right. So we have a first send account someone
who's played music to penguins, seals, drafts, and all kinds
of animals, and he reports that animals in general do
reactive with music and seem genuinely curious about it. Next,
we're going to talk to scientists who's done something similar
to plumes, but in a scientific setting. She's played music
(08:49):
to pigs to figure out what kind of music they
like to listen to and whether or not music can
make pigs feel emotions. We'll dig into that, but first
I should tell tell you about a terrible idea I had.
Is there anything that you would like to tell folks
out there?
Speaker 3 (09:07):
Yeah?
Speaker 5 (09:07):
Yes, So a lot of people are afraid to copy
my VIDs when they go and sing for animals. And
I would say, if you've seen make it, honestly, it's
so nice. If I can inspire people to do the
same thing, I won't take it badly at all. So
if you're a musician and you want to try it out,
please do.
Speaker 1 (09:23):
Oh great, I might try it out for this episode.
Speaker 3 (09:26):
All nice?
Speaker 5 (09:26):
Did you play music?
Speaker 1 (09:27):
I play a little piano and a little bit of guitar,
but I'm a terrible singer. I think that might be
the problem, but.
Speaker 5 (09:33):
I don't think they care, honestly, can't the least judge
the audience that I've had.
Speaker 1 (09:38):
Stay with us, We'll be right back, Welcome back. All right.
We're answering the question can animals appreciate music? And we
just heard from a musician play music for animals ranging
from giraffes to pandas, and according to him, the animals
(10:01):
do react, or at least they seem treious. So another
question is is this really true? Do animals have an actual
emotional reaction when you play human music for them? To
answer this question, I talk to someone who does research
in animal welfare, Professor Maria Camilla Sevaios.
Speaker 2 (10:20):
I am Maria Camilla Sevadius, and I am Associate Professor
of Animal Welfare and Behavior at the University of Calgary.
I am a researcher and specifically my research focus in
finding strategies to improve the quality of life of animals,
especially captive animals. One of the research lines which I
have started is in a strong collaboration with doctor Erardo Rodriguez,
(10:42):
is identifying music as a possible environmental enrichment.
Speaker 1 (10:47):
What is this idea of using music for animal welfare?
Speaker 2 (10:51):
When we have captive animals, there are different strategies to
improve their welfare. Right, One way to improve their welfare
is giving them some environmental such as give them control
of the environment where they are or make that environment better.
Music is and now it is environment talentca so we
(11:11):
can use different kinds of sounds to improve the environment.
Speaker 3 (11:14):
Where they are.
Speaker 1 (11:15):
I guess what do we know about how animals respond
to music?
Speaker 2 (11:19):
In animals, there is a lot of studies demonstrating that
different species of animals they react to music. They change
behaviors depending on the quality of the music or the
type of music that you put they will react right.
Speaker 1 (11:36):
According to doctors Valius, there have been many studies that
have looked at how animals react to music. Scientists have
cleared music to gorillas, chimpanzees, sparrows, elephants, cows, and dogs,
to somewhat mixed results. Some studies find that the animals
do react while others don't, and usually the studies use
(11:58):
classical music. For example, a scientists have tested whether classical
music makes guerrillas less anxious. It does, or whether it
helps dogs sleep better. It does. In one study, scientists
from the University of twelf tested whether country music made
cows want to be milk more it does. It all
(12:19):
makes doctor Sivaias and her colleagues wonder if the type
of music played to pigs made a difference.
Speaker 2 (12:27):
For example, we did a study in collaboration with doctor
Bernardo from the University of Antiochia and Juliana who was
the first author of this was her PhD.
Speaker 3 (12:37):
Study.
Speaker 2 (12:38):
We wanted to see first if pigs will react to
music right, and second, after we identified if they react
or not, what kind of music they like. More So Bernardo,
he is a musician so he created different kinds of
music where he knew all this spectro temporal characteristic of
the music. So, for example, number of instruments the high
(12:59):
frank and see contained the amplitude, the same troid desonance
right the spectral devia.
Speaker 3 (13:05):
So there are a lot.
Speaker 2 (13:06):
Of different things that you know as a musician that
you have the information.
Speaker 1 (13:12):
Doctor Sibaias and her colleagues wanted to know what kind
of music pigs react to. So they created music pieces
that had different properties, how complex it is, what frequencies
it had, and specifically they varied something called consonants. Now
I'm not a musician, but the idea is that a
certain combination of notes seem more pleasant to us than others.
(13:34):
There's no exact definition, and it's all a bit subjective.
But for example, in Western tradition, this combination of notes
is considered consonant, whereas this combination is considered dissonant. Now
(13:57):
here's an example of consonant music. The scientists played the pigs.
Here's an example of the dissonant music they played. And
(14:22):
at the same time, while of the music was playing,
doctor Sebaias and her colleagues measured the pig's emotions.
Speaker 2 (14:29):
So we use a specific indicator called qualitative behavior assessment,
which allows us to assess emotions.
Speaker 1 (14:37):
How does this work.
Speaker 2 (14:39):
This is a broad indicator where you have different terms, right,
such as for example, comfortable, stress, fearful, and there are
around twenty terms. Then you have a visual and analogical scale.
You observe the animal independent on how the animal interacts
with the environment, and you will give in that analogical scale. Okay,
(15:01):
I think this animal is happy, it's playful, it's comfortable,
or noise is stress, is fearful or things like that.
Speaker 1 (15:09):
I see. This is a person with a paper observing
the animal and then rating all of these different adjectives correct.
Speaker 2 (15:16):
And that allows us to identify how is the emotion
of the animal in terms of that specific situation.
Speaker 1 (15:23):
All right, here's the experiment. There's two parts. In the first,
the scientists played music with different characteristics to a group
of pigs and observed how the pigs reacted based on
a scale of emotions.
Speaker 2 (15:35):
From there, we identified, for example, that pigs they negatively react.
Speaker 1 (15:40):
To this music.
Speaker 2 (15:42):
If you put this on a music that will generate fear,
they will generate the stress, but consonant music will generate
like positive emotions such as play such as happy.
Speaker 1 (15:53):
So, yeah, if you found the consonant notes in music
I played for you pleasant and the dissonant music notes unpleasant,
so the pigs they have the same reaction to the
music you and I have, okay. And then the second
part of the experiment they use the music pigs like
the consonant music as a form of therapy.
Speaker 2 (16:14):
And then the next step was using that music that
we identified like that is spectro te characteristic music that
we identified that actually they were reacting better. It was
compared with pigs that did not receive any stimulus.
Speaker 1 (16:28):
Here, the pigs were split into two groups. For one
group of pigs, the scientists would play the consonant music
at different times during the day, and for the other group,
they wouldn't play them any music at all. And then
they measured two things, how the pigs behaved and also
their levels of cortsol, which is a stress hormone.
Speaker 2 (16:50):
Wholly unidentified that for example, pigs that received the music,
they would cope better with the environment in terms of
she evaliated behavioral characteristics and also physiological characteristics. Right, so
those big lids that received the environmental enrichment. Physiologically, they
had a better pattern. They are less.
Speaker 1 (17:10):
Stress okay, somehow Okay, So to recap the found, picks
seem to have an emotional reaction to different kinds of music,
and that plain for them, the music that made them
exhibit more positive emotions lowered their stress level. Okay, So
then your study and other studies have shown that animals
(17:31):
have an emotional response to music. Is that true?
Speaker 2 (17:35):
Well, so we speak about emotions, right. Other studies have
mostly focused on other indicators such as behavior or they
have physiological indicators that demonstrates that they are coping better.
But specific studies speaking about these generates emotions. We still
(17:55):
need to work and continue and trying to find emotions
to identify to evaluid emotions. It's difficult, right, Animals won't
tell you, oh, I feel good.
Speaker 1 (18:04):
Right right? Well, what do you think was happening then
in the pig's brain when you played the music that
they seem to respond better to.
Speaker 2 (18:13):
So, pigs they are extremely similar to humans, right, They
work physiologically, very very similar to us. So they have
all these structures in the brain that allows them to
process that sense, all the stimus so they will hear it,
it will enter, it will be processed in the year,
and then it will go through the ipotala mus and
(18:36):
it will go through the tiling cephalo. I would assume
that the process of the music would be pretty similar
to the process of music we have in humans, but
we don't know right there.
Speaker 1 (18:46):
Is a lack of studies on that. This princess to
the main question of the episode. What's going on in
the animals' brain when it hears music? Can they actually
appreciate it? To find out, we're going to talk to
a neuroscientists studies the brains of animals to figure out
if they have something called musicality. Stay with us, you're
(19:08):
listening to science stuff. Welcome back. We're answering the question
can animals appreciate music? And here we get to the
heart of the matter, or should I say the brain
of the matter. In the last two segments, we confirm
(19:31):
that animals react to music and that they seem to
have an emotional response to different kinds of music. Now
we'll get to the question do they really appreciate music?
To answer that, I talk to a cognitive neuroscientist who's
been studying the musicality of animals. Well, thank you doctor
Raviani for joining us.
Speaker 3 (19:52):
Thank you very much for having me. Can you please
tell us who you are and what do you do. Yes,
my name is Andre Ravignani. I am a researcher and
a professor at the Department of Human Neurosciences at Sapienza
University of Roman and also honorary professor at the Center
for Music in the Brain in Als in Denmark, which
is probably one of the few places in the world
where the study of neuroscience and music are combined.
Speaker 1 (20:14):
So can you explain to us what is biomusicology.
Speaker 3 (20:17):
It's a term that has been used a lot in
recent years to denote a biological approach to music, or
better a biological approach to musicality. And this is a
very important distinction. To make music is the you know,
the cultural artifact, the object of study of many fields
of humanities and arts. While musicality is defined as the
(20:40):
set of skills that allows us to produce, perceive music,
to move in time to music, and so on and
so forth. Musicality is more the set of psychological, cognitive,
biological building blocks that makes us musical animals.
Speaker 1 (20:55):
And so you do this by comparing humans and animals exactly.
Speaker 3 (20:59):
Our general approaches not to play Mozart to teenagers and
to cows and to see what effect it has on
their behavior. Our approach is to distill the building blocks
of musicality.
Speaker 1 (21:12):
Doctor Ravinani studies the musicality of animals, which is basically
the ability to understand music, and these published papers about
disability and seals, chimpanzees, squirrel, monkeys, penguins, whales, dogs, dolphins,
rangutans and other animals. Now, according to doctor Ravinani, musicality
(21:32):
can be broken down into a set of skills that
some animals seem to have and others don't.
Speaker 3 (21:41):
So, for instance, one of those is bit perceptions. For instance,
when we go to a club and we dance and
we're moving time to music, then we recruit these fairly
complex and neural capacity to moving time and to predict
the next bit. Other traits are vocal learning, so learning
sounds that do not belong to your natural repertoire learning
sounds that are not innate. You can think about absolute
(22:01):
and relative pitch. So imagine I play happy Birthday to you,
or imagine yeah, all the human beings singing happy birthday
to you, They're not always starting from the same note.
So I start from a sea and you start from
a C sharp. It's just the same melody, but presposed
of a semi tone, and to us it sounds exactly
the same unless you have absolute pitch. One related to
(22:23):
rhythm is meter perception. Another one is percussive behavior, and
there are many more.
Speaker 1 (22:28):
Right according to doctor Ravinyanni, there's a list of skills that,
put together, add up to an ability to perceive, understand,
and make music, in other words, to appreciate music. So
now the question is do animals have these skills. We'll
start with deep perception.
Speaker 3 (22:49):
Big perception is a very complex ability underlying our musicality,
and if we think about it for seconds, to us,
it seems natural to moving time to music. However, neurally
and psychologically, the process of bait perception is extremely complex
because music is not a metrino. It's a complex stream
of sounds. So the first thing that our brain needs
(23:09):
to do is to extract a recurring beat. So basically
we impose our expectations when is the next beat gonna come?
Speaker 1 (23:18):
So recognizing a beat is not that simple, but from
studies of human brains. Scientists knew that beat perception was
related to talking or vocalizing because they share some of
the same brain areas, and sure enough, one of the
first animals beat perception was found in where parrots.
Speaker 3 (23:40):
A study on a dancing parrot snowballed the cockatool showed
that actually, yeah, we have a second data point. So
the parrot was dancing in timed music and then speeding
up or slowing down depending on the bpm of the song,
and so on and so forth.
Speaker 1 (23:54):
So parrots can keep a beat, and apparently sil can
sea lions and seals. Twenty thirteen, Ronan, the sea lion,
became famous as the only non human mammal known that
could keep a beat. Scientists started training Ronan when the
animal was only three years old to bob its head
to a beat, and just this year, the scientists showed
(24:16):
that Ronan could keep a beat as well or better
than humans. This is also something that doctor Gravignani has
studied with seals.
Speaker 3 (24:28):
We did so called playback experiments where we broadcasted rhythmic
sounds of other seals to specific individual seals, and we
saw when they responded to the coal. So did they
respond to the sound in time with it, in synchrony
with it, and we found that in the harbor seals
they synchronized with the delay but very regularly, and they
(24:48):
adapt the bpm depending on the bpm of.
Speaker 1 (24:51):
The sound, meaning they can tense the beat.
Speaker 3 (24:53):
We need to do more research before we can say
that harbor seals can sense the beat, but definitely they
have some capacities to synchroniz eyes.
Speaker 1 (25:01):
Another musicality skill that's been found in animals is perfect pitch.
Speaker 3 (25:07):
That has been tested in quite a few bird species.
Birds so that they're very good at picking individual sounds,
so they have absolute pitch, something that is very rare
in humans, so they can recognize, okay, this is four
hundred herds, this is for fifty, for twenty, even without
being given a reference pitch.
Speaker 1 (25:23):
And another skill is the ability to tell half notes
from quarter notes.
Speaker 3 (25:30):
There is this integer ratio, a feature where you know,
if you think about we will rock you stompstonm clup,
stomp storm clup, so you have one unit of time
going from the first step to the second stone, and
then from the club to the next stomp. It's exactly
two units of time. And this produces some so called integeration.
This integer ratio we found in the injury lemurs of Madagascar.
(25:52):
So my colleagues at the University of Turin have been
recording their spontaneous vocalizations of these limours for about twenty years,
and based on this very large chorpus of limour songs,
we have seen that that's the first case of a
mammal that they are not humans that can produce this, meaning.
Speaker 1 (26:09):
That they use the quarter note and the half note.
Is that kind of what you mean? Yeah, exactly, So
lemurs can keep track of half and quarter notes. Finally,
another skilled musicality, singing together, has also been found in animals.
Speaker 3 (26:26):
Another interesting building blocks of music is the capacity for
vocal joint action or for vocal coordination. So gibbondes are apes.
They're the one apes the farthest away from us, but
they are still apes. They're not monkeys. And they sing
in duets. Right, So a male and a female will
pay a bond for a long while and they sing
to each other in a duet where some notes overlap
(26:46):
and some don't. And what we have seen is they
coordinate their song. Sometimes males do solos, sometimes males singing
a duet and if we compare the rhythm of their
song in a solo or in a duet, we see
a star difference between the two. So we see that
when the male sings in a duet, his notes are
much more adjusted and predictable to coordinate with the female.
(27:08):
This kind of vocal coordination that we deploy when we
sing in a choir or in many other contexts.
Speaker 1 (27:12):
It's the ability to listen and then adapt your own
music production.
Speaker 3 (27:17):
Yeah, your own vocal production.
Speaker 1 (27:19):
Interesting. So we've seen that in the animal kingdom.
Speaker 3 (27:22):
Indeed very often in singing privates and also in birds.
Speaker 1 (27:26):
Now there are musicality skills that haven't been found in animals.
For example, the ability to recognize a melody even if
you play it on a different scale. That's called led
transposition or meter, which is recognizing patterns or groupings and
beats haven't been seen in any animal. But doctor Ramniani
argies that doesn't mean animals can't do it. It just
(27:49):
means we need to keep looking.
Speaker 3 (27:52):
They take on messages that for every musicality trade. Every
time someone says, I reckon that this musicality building block
is unique human, then a few years later someone finds
a species that also has that traite, right, So it
particularly goes like that. So I think the take on
message of all these research until now is that even
though the full package of these musicality traits might be
(28:14):
uniquely human, for each trait we can find at least
another animal species that has it, so we are not
so unique after all.
Speaker 1 (28:22):
All right, So the components of understanding and appreciating music
have been found in different animals, but to date humans
seem to be the only species with all the skills.
Now what does that mean for our main question? So
if someone were to ask you, do you think animals
can appreciate music? How would you answer that question?
Speaker 3 (28:44):
I think the short answer to that that we really
do not know. I think that the first question to
ask is do they even care about it? So carrying
and appreciating music is a bit of an anthropocentric perspective
in a way, because for us it's such an important thing.
And then on top of that, music is the human
cultural artifact. Right would you enjoy listening for hours of
(29:06):
dolphin whistles or chimpanzee drumming? There are animal signals, animal sounds,
communicative sounds.
Speaker 1 (29:13):
But it sounds like we have found some musicality in
some species. It is the question, then, can you connect
that musicality to feelings for some sort of reaction.
Speaker 3 (29:22):
Yes, potentially some music sounds and no music sounds can
have some emotional value for different species. But this has
to do with more basic sound perception rather than music
per se.
Speaker 1 (29:33):
I see. So the answer might be that they might
be able to appreciate music, but probably not human music.
Speaker 3 (29:39):
Yeah, potentially species specific music. Actually, some colleagues in the
US have been working towards trying to understand whether we
can make species specific music. So there are even albums
out there on iTunes of cat music, and the peer
reviewed studies where they showed that you know, this cat
specific music played by a cello in used relaxation in cats,
(29:59):
and so on and so forth.
Speaker 1 (30:00):
Okay, last question. The first part of this episode, I
told the musician who plays music for animals, I was
going to try it, and I'm terrible and I don't
think very well, but I'm gonna try to sing to
some animals, maybe a dog or a cat. How do
you think that dog or cat is going to react?
Speaker 3 (30:14):
So, first of all, it depends on the species. So
a cat and a dog have already a very different
perceptual and cognitive world one from one another. Right, How
they see the world and how they feel the world
as we know is very different, right, even between breeds
of dogs. And then it also depends a lot on
the experiences that that cat or dog has done during
their life. Right, so you know, imagine that the dog
(30:37):
was raised by an owner.
Speaker 4 (30:39):
That we always think we don't really high pitch to
convey that, come on here, cuties, Or imagine that the
dog was mistreated by someone with a very deep noise
like that, And then if you hit some.
Speaker 3 (30:52):
Low notes, the dog is not going to have a
very good reaction, right, And then who knows? Again, I
don't explve the fact that many animals might be enjoying music,
our own music, their own music, but we still don't
know enough I see, Right, So if you pay music
to a catera dog, they either won't care or they
will react based on what those sounds have been associated
(31:13):
with in the past. And don't get me wrong, and
not belittling animals, I love animals. What I'm saying is
that their cognitive and perceptual world is very complex and
nuance like our own, and so the music that you're
going to play or sing is the result of a
bunch of cultural accumulation, and that probably not all the
nuances we see in them are gonna speak to them,
(31:33):
and vice versa.
Speaker 1 (31:35):
All right, So to recap the whole episode, animals seem
to react to music. They can have what seems like
an emotional response to it. For example, you can play
music that lowers their stress level. And many species seem
to have the brain circuits to do single musical tasks
like keep a beat or tell notes apart or sing together.
(31:56):
But whether they can appreciate music might depend whether they
can even hear the sounds in that music and what
their life experience has been with those sounds. It's just
like how we don't necessarily appreciate a bird song, or
how some of us don't like heavy metal or country
music or music from another culture. All right, I'll leave
(32:26):
you with the image a man with a guitar in
a field playing music to an eight foot tall bird.
Here's Plumes singing a song. Hey road to an Ostrich.
Thanks for joining us, See you next time you've been
(32:58):
listening to science Stuffduction of iHeartRadio Bringing the produced by
me or hitch Ham prendedate by Rose Seguda, executive producer
Jerry Rowland, and audio engineer and mixer Kasey Pecrom. You
can follow me on social media. Just search for PhD
Comics and the name of your favorite platform. Be sure
to subscribe to sign stuff on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
(33:20):
or wherever you get your podcasts, and please tell your friends.
We'll be back next Wednesday with another episode. All right, today,
I'm singing for Chloe the Dog and Mango the Cat. Chloe,
you Mango, Here we go. It had to be. It
(33:42):
had to be. I wandered averund fine, elly fan soundbody
who's yeah? I don't think they care. You don't seem
that impressed. What are the animals doing?
Speaker 2 (34:04):
What was the Mango?
Speaker 1 (34:06):
The cat went behind you and we started just kind
of like laying out and stretching out, and so I
think he was definitely listening.
Speaker 3 (34:13):
For sure, he comes and listens when I played the guitar.
She won't really hang out with me in here, but
he will all come and.
Speaker 2 (34:19):
Play the guitar and he'll sit on the couch or
he'll just lay on the carpet next to me
Speaker 1 (34:22):
And he'll just hang out so he does that her
not so much, but he definitely does
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