Reply #86: While we are hitting all the points

[DireStrike]

Music is NOT unique to the human species. I'm guessing you are discrediting the songs birds and whales right off the bat as "not music"? Seems arrogant and species-centric.

Here are a couple results from the first page of google animals + music

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/06/AR2009090601990.html
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/09/09/MN0T19KAP4.DTL

Excellent point in here: http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2003/11/09/songs_of_ourselves/

Schwartz's study also casts light on the long-running question of whether animals understand or appreciate music. Despite the apparent abundance of "music" in the natural world -- birdsong, whalesong, wolf howls, synchronized chimpanzee hooting -- previous studies have found that many laboratory animals don't show a great affinity for the human variety of music making.

Marc Hauser and Josh McDermott of Harvard argued in the July issue of Nature Neuroscience that animals don't create or perceive music the way we do. The fact that laboratory monkeys can show recognition of human tunes is evidence, they say, of shared general features of the auditory system, not any specific chimpanzee musical ability. As for birds, those most musical beasts, they generally recognize their own tunes -- a narrow repertoire -- but don't generate novel melodies like we do. There are no avian Mozarts.

But what's been played to the animals, Schwartz notes, is human music. If animals evolve preferences for sound as we do -- based upon the soundscape in which they live -- then their "music" would be fundamentally different from ours. In the same way our scales derive from human utterances, a cat's idea of a good tune would derive from yowls and meows. To demonstrate that animals don't appreciate sounds the way we do, we'd need evidence that they don't respond to "music" constructed from their own sound environment.

No matter how the connection between language and music is parsed, what is apparent is that our sense of music, even our love for it, is as deeply rooted in our biology and in our brains as language is. This is most obvious with babies, says Sandra Trehub at the University of Toronto, who also published a paper in the Nature Neuroscience special issue.

And do I really need to get the youtube links of dancing cockatoos and cats and dogs yowling with a piano?


For the record I think it is disgusting to ban music and/or dancing for religious reasons.