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S03 Episode 05: How Music Affects Animals
123 Plays3 years ago
S03 Episode 05: How Music Affects Animals by Indre Viskontas
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Transcript
The Impact of 'Songs of the Humpback Whale'
00:00:00
Speaker
This record, Songs of the Humpback Whale, that pain in McVeigh, put out into the world, people began to take whales much more seriously, as beautiful, intelligent, incredible animals worth saving, and that's where the Save the Whales movement began, because of the fact that these animals make music, and people did not know about this. There was a Japanese whaling executive from a whale meat company in Japan, and Scott McVeigh was in Tokyo, played this album for him, and he just
00:00:30
Speaker
you know, started to shed tears on the national TV in Japan and said, I'm so sorry. We didn't know. We did not know. This is what these animals were up to. So if you have a world of animals making music, it's a world of animals that human beings are going to care more about. They're going to work ever harder to save.
Exploring Music's Connection to the Mind and Animals
00:00:51
Speaker
Welcome back to Cadence, the podcast where we explore what music can tell us about the mind. I'm Andrea Viscontes.
00:01:10
Speaker
Usually on this podcast we limit ourselves to what music can tell us about the human mind. But you can't really understand biology unless you see it through the lens of evolution. And so if music is something primal to humans, built into our DNA as I think it is, then there must be some precursors of music, or even fairly advanced musical abilities in other species. You might think that studying animal music is a niche within a niche within a niche.
00:01:37
Speaker
But for some neuroscientists and musicians, like those we're going to talk to today, it's actually a window into some of the most mysterious aspects of human nature. How we feel and express emotions, how we communicate with other beings, how we find meaning in our very existence.
00:01:56
Speaker
David Tai is a cellist in the National Symphony Orchestra, and he's a composer of music specifically for non-human animals. He thinks that we like music because it affects us physiologically, triggering our emotions directly.
00:02:10
Speaker
Why we like music, I believe it goes directly through auditory processing straight to our emotions. That's the basic story, is that if I scream and you're in the room, your heart rate will go up, your eyes will dilate. There's nothing you can do about it. It goes straight to our emotions, sounds like that. And so that there are many sounds that we have in our vocalizations that trigger kind of automatic responses.
00:02:38
Speaker
And some of them are connective, kind of affective. So what are some of the signatures of emotion in sounds? And are they universal? Like if you have a baby and you go, oh, isn't this sweet? That's kind of a high pure tone. High pure tones tend to be affectionate. And if I say, oh, I'm going to get you, you're going to...
00:03:00
Speaker
Low harsh sounds are threats. And so in music, when we hear low harsh sounds, it tends to excite. And high pure tones, they tend to feel much more calm. But what about other species whose auditory processing, the range of frequencies that they can actually hear, is quite different from ours?
David Tai's Musical Journey and Experimentation
00:03:20
Speaker
This is true actually across many different species. What's high for us is low to a cotton-topped tamarin monkey, and what's high to a cotton-topped tamarin monkey is low to a bat. So since it's a relative thing, the frequency matters.
00:03:37
Speaker
To get hired as one of the cellists with the National Symphony Orchestra, you have to be pretty good. And to build that skill set, it helps immensely if you start early, when your childish brain is ripe for molding. I often think that string players especially are drawn to their instruments right from the start, or that their parents put the instrument in their hands and they eventually learn to love it. But with David, it seems that his brother had more of an influence than anyone else, and maybe not entirely with the best of intentions.
00:04:07
Speaker
Well, technically, my brother would have me say, which is true, he really chose the cello, because we were all singers in our family, so we all sang, but my brother and I played instruments as well, and I played the saxophone, and apparently I was so bad that
00:04:23
Speaker
We had a family meeting to try to get me to play something else. My dad says all the geese in northern Minnesota were in our backyard when I practiced the saxophone. So I decided that I would think about something else. We had this meeting and my brother said, how about the cello? And I didn't even know what a cello was.
00:04:46
Speaker
And so I look into it and I went to hear a concert of a great old musician and I say, yes, yes, that I want to play that. I've always been very fond of the cello myself. I even tried to convince my four year old ones that it was the instrument for him. He had one lesson and figured he knew enough to stop trying. And since I'm an opera singer, I listened to the cello and I feel like I get it in a way that doesn't really happen with other instruments.
00:05:15
Speaker
I think the emotional hit can be put into one fairly simple concept, and that is quality of sound. It's the difference between what we actually mean to say, I think is more about quality of sound than even the words. We tend to think that words communicate everything. We read things. But if I were to say, I like your hair, or I like your hair,
00:05:44
Speaker
I like your hair. Depending on the intonation and the quality of sound, it can mean everything from, I don't like your hair, to, hey, let's have lunch sometimes. You're looking good. So the communication is in the quality of sound. And what the cello can do is create many different qualities.
00:06:07
Speaker
It also has the entire range of the human voice. So everything from the basso profundo to the contralto, the soprano, highest notes of female voices. And so it can encompass human vocalizations completely.
00:06:30
Speaker
So how does a person whose chosen instrument resembles the human voice end up composing an album for cats? Which, if we're being honest here, just doesn't move me. A cat-loving human, sonically.
00:06:43
Speaker
Well, I first got into it. I've been allergic to animals as long as I can remember. And so I didn't grow up as kind of an animal person. And it was music that entirely just took up every part of me. And so when I came up with this theory, it
00:07:02
Speaker
really was just a test. Any good theory is testable. And so if I was right about having figured out, you might say, the recipe of music and how it works, how it's put together, I should be able to take the ingredients that are now designed for humans and tailor them to the parameters of some other species and make music that's effective for another species.
00:07:26
Speaker
It was a wide open field because of the many, many studies that have been done on the effect of music on animals that basically came up totally dry. All the controlled studies showed they just don't give a damn about human music.
00:07:42
Speaker
I found a fellow who was interested in the ideas. In Chuck Snowden, he had a colony of cotton-topped tamarin monkeys. And so I studied their vocalizations and their brain development and designed music just for the cotton-topped tamarin monkeys.
00:07:57
Speaker
And so I really kind of backed into it as a test of the theory. And since that was successful, the test was successful and we got a good deal of press out of it. And that's when my fascination with that animal and the discovery of how beautiful and
00:08:18
Speaker
incredibly rich the communication of these tamarind monkeys is that that's when I really started getting interested in the animals themselves. So I tried to bring it to other species and basically that's my life's project. Bring as much music to as many species as possible.
00:08:39
Speaker
So given that our auditory processing, the frequency range of sound waves that we turn into heard sounds, and the specific sounds that are important to us as human beings, all of these characteristics are going to be different for other animals. How should we go about creating music that they would find meaningful?
00:08:57
Speaker
how do we even know that they're enjoying it? When you consider the problem this way, this is actually one of the most profound questions of all science. It gets at what it means to have a subjective experience, what it's like for a bat to be a bat, and then for that bat to enjoy something sublime like music.
00:09:19
Speaker
And this existential, philosophical question is exactly what David Tye needed to ponder as he set out to write music for cats. Since the cat's brain is basically developed outside the womb, the pulse of the cat, the mother, won't really be a salient sound. But what I did think is that the sound of suckling is a sound that all cats will have heard as their brains were developing.
00:09:46
Speaker
So I included I have something like I don't know 20 different suckling instruments like a canvas like
00:09:55
Speaker
I had one guy even scratching his beard, and I thought that made a nice suckling sound. And so I combined some of them with wind sounds. And the other vocalization that was important is the purr, as we know cats purr when they're content, but they also purr when they're in pain.
00:10:20
Speaker
And so it seemed to me, relative to our moan, that humans, we moan in pleasure and we moan in pain. It sounds like an odd thing that such very different feelings should evoke the same vocalization, but I think that they're both intended to elicit some sympathy from the listener.
00:10:41
Speaker
And so it is, I believe, with cats and their prayers that it's more of a kind of, do you feel me? Communication. And so, including spur instruments is going to be an important part of this music as well. I'm happy to say that they also did a test of the
00:11:04
Speaker
the cat music at the University of Wisconsin, and the data were even stronger for the cats than they had been for the monkeys, which was a bit surprising to me since they're a much less vocal species, but I was still very happy with it.
00:11:24
Speaker
So, Data Tai composes music for other species, and his scientific approach to the process is really quite admirable. But what about making music with other species? Music, after all, is human social glue. Can it help glue us to other animal species, not just our own?
Music as Communication Between Humans and Animals
00:11:42
Speaker
And can we learn something new about them and ourselves by including them in the band?
00:11:48
Speaker
Here's David Rothenberg. He's a professor of philosophy and music and a composer and jazz musician himself.
00:11:57
Speaker
When I make music together with other animals, I think about it the way I might make music with another human being who maybe doesn't share my language, whom I can't talk to. But music somehow can cross cultural lines. And once we admit that other species also can make music, we can understand them in a way without explaining what they are thinking about, without needing to
00:12:24
Speaker
without needing to know necessarily what it means because we really don't know what music means. We know it's important to us and we can maybe take the leap and assume it might be important for other animals. So if you imagine, say, a mockingbird is talking
00:12:40
Speaker
then you want to decipher what he's saying. But if you imagine a mockingbird is making music, it's instantly accessible. Okay, it's music. I can join in. We can share something. So by calling certain animal sounds musical, they're instantly more accessible. So who knows if they're hearing different frequencies, or if they hear at a different speed, or maybe one particular sound means so much to them and means nothing to us.
00:13:04
Speaker
We still, if you take it as music, it's instantly easier to make sense of it than if it's a language we don't understand.
00:13:30
Speaker
Perhaps it's harder for us to understand the language of a species so far from us evolutionarily speaking, like birds or cats. But maybe it's easier when that species is actually a close primate relative. Sue Savage Rumbaugh is a primatologist and a language researcher. She was the first to communicate and study the language of bonobos, and she's famous for her work with a particular bonobo named Kanzi.
00:13:54
Speaker
He was the first to acquire words like human babies do. How did she get him to do that? Well, she takes a holistic approach to teaching bonobos to speak. She rears them and immerses herself with them. And in that way, she has been successful, unlike many other people who have tried, in teaching bonobos how to communicate with us using language. I've spent my career working with non-humans, bonobos.
00:14:19
Speaker
which are the species of ape that's most like humans. And they are also the species of ape that's the most vocal and they have very musical vocalizations. And I got connected with other musicians and this group through Peter Gabriel who came and worked in our lab for several weeks for three or four occasions until he was able to get the bonobos to actually co-create music with him. It's time to do the music.
00:14:53
Speaker
But Kanzi and Peter jam out, while Sue helps and encourages the Pinomo.
00:15:11
Speaker
Alright, it sounds a little different but it's pretty.
00:15:38
Speaker
So what about music? Do bonobos also make music? Is it as much a part of their communication as it is of ours? In our human species, we think of music and language as two very different things. I believe that at some point they merge and maybe in our past we were more musical. But we can now, with text and writing, we can completely eliminate all tonal qualities.
00:16:05
Speaker
Of course, Kanzi learned how to use lexigrams, which are a form of writing, but he also began to understand spoken English. And I have to say, I'm very embarrassed that I could not understand his spoken bonobo. I did not get exposed to it as a baby. He was exposed to my spoken English as a baby. So I think his brain began to process it very early as language.
00:16:31
Speaker
But his brain also processed what his bonobo mother spoke, and he would often attempt to translate what she spoke, although it seemed like we... It was very difficult for him to translate the two languages, although he could speak both languages. But I have to say that the bonobo language is very musical. It sounds like
00:16:59
Speaker
sometimes a high-pitched flute is playing or like a bird is talking, but not the continuous quality. It has more spaces in between it. So Kanzi and the other bonobos often made sounds that at night when they went to bed that everybody would say the bonobos are singing.
00:17:19
Speaker
But when they spoke, sometimes it sounded like singing. And you can see what his high tones sound like. And if you listen closely, you can see he's making very distinct different tones and changes in these high pitched tones very rapidly.
00:17:35
Speaker
And as he does so, he's making them right after I say a word to show me that that's his word. Or he's making the sound right after I touch a lexigram to show me that that's his word for the lexigram. Or sometimes he's saying his word and touching the lexigram at the same time.
00:17:54
Speaker
But when your ear first hears these sounds it's not accustomed to it and everybody just calls them peeps They say old bonobos are making peeps. They're those high peeps and we do the same kind of thing with birds many people assume that the Different peeps and the bonobos don't have different meanings, but Kanzi will actually show us what his peeps mean sweet potato
00:18:22
Speaker
Here, we can hear Kanzi's peeps again, but slower, so it's easier for our human ears to distinguish the different sounds.
00:18:39
Speaker
Conversing through music and conversing through speech are pretty different. And even if we might see a lot of overlap, we can generally tell the difference between musicians playing together and people having a conversation. So how do you go from thinking about interspecies communication, trying to talk to each other, to trying to make music together?
00:19:01
Speaker
Well, if I had to pick someone as an ambassador to try this out, I might choose a very famous, popular, talented musician, like Peter Gabriel. The difference between music and conversation is that conversation goes back and forth between two individuals or sometimes three or four, as we're doing now. When you sing, you often sing together, or when you play instruments, you play instruments together.
00:19:30
Speaker
But in terms of something like jazz music or the kind of music that Peter began to do with the Bonobos, it was co-constructed. They were musically going back and forth. And the most interesting thing that happened was that
00:19:47
Speaker
Peter, this beautiful musician, came and sat outside their enclosures and played music and played music and we asked them to play and they just wanted to listen to Peter. This went on for like several weeks. And of course we all liked listening to Peter, but Peter wanted to play with them and we would say, why don't you play with Peter?
00:20:08
Speaker
and we would hand them a keyboard. We never taught them how to use a keyboard, but they would play around with a musical keyboard. We never taught them repetitive songs where they had to memorize each note. And a few people tried. They didn't really, the bonobos didn't really like that. So we never pursued it. Pretty.
00:20:39
Speaker
I want to hear you.
00:20:48
Speaker
But the thing that got it going was one day, I began to realize that I'm not getting a musical dialogue at all with Peter. They don't want to play with Peter. They just want to listen to Peter. So I said, well, Peter and Kanzi and Pamanisha, how about if we played a song to talk to your mother, Matata? Matata was over in another building.
00:21:12
Speaker
And they went, wow, wow, wow, and Matata answered, wow, wow, wow. And so they started playing a song and Peter joined in. So the moment that we turned song into a dialogue and song for a purpose, a song to talk to Matata,
00:21:28
Speaker
we got the connection between Peter and the Bonobos. And as soon as we got the connection, Peter, with his incredible ability, began to go back and forth musically with them. The way he had heard me go back and forth with my voice in talking to them and the lexigrams. And he began to say that his keyboard was a musical keyboard and my keyboard was a text kind of keyboard, but we're doing the same thing is what Peter said.
00:21:56
Speaker
And he was so good at it that he could craft their ability to play their keyboard just the way he interacted with them by getting in their musical space, which of course I could never do. I'm not a musician. I had no idea how to do it, but I could get into their dialogue space and I could have a conversation with them each time from that point on
00:22:20
Speaker
that we did a song. We always figured out what the topic of the song was going to be about. What were we going to sing about? Or who were we going to sing to? And once that took place, there was no more listening to Peter. They were always playing with Peter. And because Peter was such an expert at moving them along, the more they played with Peter, the better they became.
00:22:47
Speaker
But I could never have gotten them better by sitting down and giving them piano lessons. It would have never worked. So people can easily go online and hear Panbanisha and Kanzi playing musical songs that are co-constructed in the moment.
00:23:27
Speaker
Before we leave Peter and Sue's work with the Bonobos behind, I just wanted to highlight a few insights that their work has generated. Peter and Sue didn't want to just make noise with the Bonobos or entertain them with music. They wanted to see if the Bonobos might want to make music with Peter. And that was only possible because of a few factors.
00:23:47
Speaker
One, these particular animals were co-reared by Sue and her staff along with their mother. And as Sue says, no effort was spared to make the rearing environment of Kanzi and Pambanisha as wonderful, interesting, and socially relevant as possible. And Sue didn't just train the animals to mimic human behaviors. Her lab kept to an important principle, do not teach.
00:24:12
Speaker
Instead, expose apes to language, music, art, etc., and see what they pick up, what they're interested in. They were not simply rewarded for making behaviors that would look to us like music. They seemed to be drawn to it entirely on their own.
00:24:27
Speaker
But the Bonobos only seemed to be interested in making music with Peter when they had a common shared goal, to entertain Matata. Peter and the Bonobos were co-creating songs together, and this requires great talent and appreciation on both sides.
00:24:44
Speaker
from Peter and from Kanzi and Panvanisha. These conditions have not been replicated as far as we know with other species, including those of other apes. And it might never be possible again, as it's unclear whether anyone will be able to spend 40 years crafting such an environment for apes, as ethical and financial considerations come into play.
Music and Conservation Efforts with Elephants
00:25:03
Speaker
But as David Solger, neuroscientist at Columbia, jazz and avant-garde musician and composer describes next, making music with animals can help conservation efforts, especially when those animals are social, like elephants. It seems somehow easier to accept that a species so evolutionarily close to us, like the bonobo, might share some musical abilities. But even elephants can get in on the groove.
00:25:30
Speaker
The Asian elephant population has been in a plummeting population decline. In Thailand, around 100 years ago, there were 100,000 elephants. There's now roughly somewhere around five or 6,000. And most of the elephants 100 years ago, not all of them, there's still a population of roughly 3,000 wild elephants.
00:25:58
Speaker
But they were domesticated elephants, and they were used mostly as trucks and also in the logging industry, because they can pull down trees and so on. As Thailand became paved, and you had gasoline-driven trucks, and you had other ways to take down lumber, and as Thailand became deforested, the population badly dwindled.
00:26:24
Speaker
And to some extent, this is replicated all over Asia. There are a lot of problems with this. Some of them are problems related to disease, of course, habitat, and also eventually inbreeding.
00:26:36
Speaker
because the Asian elephant could die out in some number of generations by having a smaller germ pool. So part of the reason to do the orchestra was conservation related. So we wanted to, I'm not saying we, it's really Richard Lehrer and a bunch of his compatriots in Thailand who are the real conservationists. We wanted the Thai public
00:27:02
Speaker
to know about the Conservation Center, and to be proud of it. You know, the Thais are very proud of the elephants, but they're mostly proud for historical reasons that go back a long time, and not necessarily due to the situation as it is right now. So let's get the Thai public interested in this kind of thing, and also to some extent the international public, people coming from the States and Europe, and people particularly coming from China and Japan.
00:27:30
Speaker
So Comar and Melamede found that they could very rapidly teach elephants to paint. This is not original to Comar and Melamede. It actually, to anyone's knowledge, started independently in the Berlin Zoo back about 100 years ago. And then again, with an elephant named Renee in the Cleveland Zoo, working with her trainer, Don Redfox. So how do you go from teaching elephants to paint to having them play music?
00:27:57
Speaker
Richard had been in Thailand without having been back to America, where he's from, for about 20 years.
00:28:05
Speaker
And we were sitting around and he said, well, you know, elephants like music. Everybody that lives with elephants know that. If people start playing music, they'll come over to listen. And you sing to them when you bring them in from the forest every morning. So we came up with the idea, let's try to make instruments that are ergonomic. It can be easily played by elephants because if they're designed for elephants,
00:28:29
Speaker
Maybe, maybe they'll play them. And so I took a trip out there, brought some colleagues, some collaborators, really friends. And I found a metal shop in Limapeng. And we built giant instruments made out of metal that are the size for elephants, the ones that they wouldn't break easily. If you give them a conventional human instrument, it will be gone in a few seconds.
00:28:51
Speaker
We built things like giant marimbas and gongs and a whole set of instruments over, I think we finally counted up something like over 40 instruments. And these are domesticated elephants, so they're used to doing very, very complex behavior that are taught by humans far more complicated than anything you could imagine from a horse or dog or cat.
00:29:15
Speaker
They will learn to play instruments very quickly, you know, within five minutes if it's a well-designed instrument for them. So the Mahauts originally thought we were crazy, but it worked. And once they saw that the elephants would play music and would play music with the humans, you know, so you have a Mahaut playing an instrument or I brought my violin and we'd play with them, they became very enthusiastic.
00:29:39
Speaker
and so over the course of six years it expanded and expanded again up to about 14 or 16 elephants knew how to play music they have three CDs you could see them easily on video and we'll see we'll see where it leads so it did help bring attention to
00:30:01
Speaker
from the tourists and particularly they learned a couple of songs that everybody in Thailand knows and you know that helps with kind of national pride and I think that helps with the commitment of the Thai people to the future of the Asian elephant.
00:30:30
Speaker
So now we can compose music that other species like. We can make music with them. But what does all of this teach us about ourselves? What can animal music tell us about our own minds?
00:30:43
Speaker
Why is it so interesting if animals imitate us and repeat the things that we repeat to them? What's interesting is that they have their own musical senses that we can learn and we can realize it's different from ours, but we can learn from them just like we can learn music from different cultures. And this is something that Charles Darwin was well aware of when he wrote that
00:31:05
Speaker
birds have a natural aesthetic sense. That's why they've evolved beautiful feathers and beautiful songs. And each species, some more than others, has evolved a different aesthetic way of appearance and behavior and performance. And this music that they're making, again, it's not all the sounds that birds make as being music, but the musical sounds are developed in this whole evolution of aesthetic culture and that they have this sense of beauty
00:31:35
Speaker
They have their own structures some most bird songs are very short, you know They're very short but very stylized and structured and then some of these birds have these very long songs That go on for hours and you have this one whale species We have no idea why this one whale species needs to sing during mating season for up to 24 hours Why did that possibly evolve and why did all the other whale species not need to evolve this behavior at all? It's like an extraordinary example of the strange
00:32:05
Speaker
stuff that evolution can produce.
00:32:16
Speaker
But can we use music effectively with other species in ways that are similar to the ways in which we use music as humans? We often use music to help us process our emotions, to give us comfort in times of stress, to motivate us to work out. Well, might some of the same uses be helpful to animals?
00:32:36
Speaker
Lori Kogan is a professor of clinical sciences for the College of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences at Colorado State University. She studies human-animal interaction, and she's particularly interested in how we might use music to improve animal welfare.
Music's Role in Animal Welfare and Education
00:32:52
Speaker
Really all of my research focuses around human-animal interaction and I'm always looking for ways to improve the lives of people and animals and the welfare of animals in particular. And we all know that being in a kennel is extremely stressful to dogs and so ways that we can
00:33:11
Speaker
that are easy for shelters to implement and hopefully inexpensive, I felt like could be of benefit to everybody. So not only the dogs, but the people that work there and then the potential adopters. And so there certainly has been a lot of research looking at music and the impact of music on humans. And so I felt like perhaps there's something here that we could look at to help these dogs in shelters.
00:33:39
Speaker
It's actually a current interest of mine of how poorly we as humans are able to know what animals are thinking and feeling. We should be best at dogs, but we're not even really good at dogs, which is always fascinating to me because dogs are super good at reading humans. They've evolved that way and we are not very good at reading dogs.
00:34:03
Speaker
Since we're not very good at reading dogs, how is it that we can learn to understand their behavior and even get a sense of whether what we're doing is making their lives better?
00:34:13
Speaker
What I did was looked at some very, very specific things that we could code. So I looked at activity. So whether they were sleeping or whether they were doing any other activity, so moving or standing or sitting or lying down. And then I looked at vocalization. So I started out looking at whether they were totally silent, whether they were barking or whether they were doing something else like whining or yipping.
00:34:36
Speaker
As a matter of fact, I ended up combining barking and the other category together because even though when I say it right now, it sounds like it should be really clear what's barking and what's yipping. It's not always super clear. So we just went for silence or other type of vocalization.
00:34:55
Speaker
And then we also looked at kind of that nervous body shaking that dogs do when they're nervous and agitated. And so either, and that was a yes, no, they're either doing that shaking behavior that's that we can see just by looking at them or they're not. David Talley has found that it's also difficult to read monkeys and to draw connections between the ways in which they communicate and what maybe sounds like music to our human ears.
00:35:19
Speaker
It was fascinating for me to work kind of backwards to see how many aspects of the tamarin communication are relevant to music, including dissonant intervals, which are used for threats, and consonant intervals, which are used for affiliative, connective kind of vocalizations, and the pure sounds, and even rhythms.
00:35:44
Speaker
that very smooth rhythms that there is a mother to infant call, whereas their threat vocalizations are very irregular rhythms and everything is chaotic about it. And so it was informative to the theory itself when I realized that this polarity between order and chaos is expressive in a broad range of
00:36:13
Speaker
of sonic variables, you might say. These variables that appear in the natural world, of course, are going to affect how we interpret the data from animal communication. So what do they mean? So I wanted kind of a variety of some classical music pieces because there's certainly some research showing that humans are relaxed by classical music.
00:36:34
Speaker
And so I picked four different types of classical music because you can play some pretty radical classical music. So these were kind of more of the soothing, calm, classical pieces. And then three heavy metal pieces that tended to be, in my opinion, a little bit more jarring or what we usually define of as heavy metal.
00:36:56
Speaker
And then I also picked a piece of music that was actually created specifically for dogs and that it's advertised as being calming and soothing for dogs. And so I wanted to see if that made a difference and then we had the control which was no music at all.
00:37:14
Speaker
What we found was it really supported the theory that these dogs tended to like classical music and I'm saying like in that they were certainly less body shaking as far as nervousness. They were quiet more and they were sleeping more for classical music. And in fact they liked Beethoven's moonlight Sonata. It seemed like the best.
00:37:37
Speaker
They definitely did not like the heavy metal music. There was a lot more kind of nervous shaking compared with everything else. So compared to like no music at all or compared to the music that was created specifically for dogs. The music for dogs
00:37:53
Speaker
didn't seem to have as much of a positive impact as just the regular classical music. Music written specifically for dogs is kind of like the work that David Tye does for cats and tamarind monkeys. This particular track was not one of David's, but the concept is similar.
00:38:11
Speaker
I was actually really surprised because I would have thought that it would have. So I'm not sure. I mean, of course I would add these caveats of like, well, it was one shelter, even though we did thousands of samples.
00:38:26
Speaker
You know, it's possible that there was something else going on. I mean, I would certainly want to hopefully replicate it with that type of music again. But to me, the take home message was, my gosh, because you can get, you know, a lot of this classical music for free, you know, anywhere now. And that that seemed to be a super easy, cheap method of reducing stress.
00:38:50
Speaker
So despite the somewhat surprising finding that music written specifically for dogs did not seem to be more calming than Beethoven, in Laurie's study at least, we can't always use our gut to predict what kind of reaction music might have on a different animal. Here's David Tye talking about what happened when he played speed metal to the cotton-top tamarind monkeys.
00:39:13
Speaker
Interestingly, the one anomaly in the testing was that they were calmed by speed metal.
00:39:22
Speaker
music so that the fast that we'd play it out of piece by tool and that would basically calm them down. And what I realized after that I should have been aware of this before, but the tempo of speed metal is about the same tempo as the resting heart rate of an adult tamarind monkey. So it was a ballad to them. But the other music, the calming music,
00:39:50
Speaker
included high pure tones for them which sound like kind of whistles and then the discovery of the kind of music that would get them that was basically threat based which is like our threat based
00:40:05
Speaker
Heavy metal music was based on their vocalizations of the warning sign. I wanted to see the music intervention in action, and I found an animal shelter here in San Francisco where I live that uses music in such a way. It's called Muttville, and the motto of Muttville is to give senior dogs a second life. There are no cages, which was what makes Muttville a pretty unique shelter, but they also play music.
00:40:35
Speaker
Muttville is one of the only cage-free facilities that I know of in the United States. Definitely if it's not the only, it's one of the first. We started in 2007 and we rescue dogs that are seven and older and we are a cage-free facility.
00:40:54
Speaker
We kind of modeled after our founder's house. So she started by pulling dogs one by one from municipal shelter. She was a volunteer here in San Francisco at Animal Care and Control right down the street. And she noticed that these dogs just weren't even making it to the adoption floor because no one thought they were adoptable. But she knew they were because she interacted with them all the time.
00:41:16
Speaker
So she started taking them one by one into her home and kind of had a de facto Muttville going on. The first year she rescued 25 dogs and this year we're on track to rescue 1,100. So how do they use music in the shelter environment?
00:41:33
Speaker
I went to a conference last year, an animal welfare conference, and there was a session on music and the impact it has in a shelter environment. And we're kind of a unique shelter since we don't have cages, but a big problem for rural shelters is these dogs just aren't getting any type of stimulation at all. So music in those environments plays a huge impact for us. We wanted to see if it would help, you know, some of our more nervous dogs when they're first arriving relax.
00:42:03
Speaker
And it's hard to say because we're not doing like A-B testing, but for us, I truly do think it plays a role. We continue to use it. The music that came out of the conference was kind of like this classical music that wasn't something that you or I would listen to. It was like custom made for animals. So it made it difficult to listen to during the day when we were here because it was so, you know, kind of out of the norm.
00:42:30
Speaker
But at night we'll play it sometimes. I feel like music will kind of echo into how you're feeling emotionally. So we try and keep things relaxed or happy. So we're not playing any heavy metal or anything like that. And at night we always switch. We usually have like 1950s or 1960s music during the day. And then in the evening we'll turn into something classical without words, just something calming. And
00:42:56
Speaker
again who's to say how much of an impact it has but we have a nest cam where we can watch the dogs at night well we me and they're all just like laying on all the futons snuggled up and sleeping and i do think that having something relaxing playing in the background
00:43:16
Speaker
plays a huge role especially you know we're in the mission there's a lot of noise we're right by the street there's a lot of buses going by a lot of cars sirens so i think having that calming music uh makes a makes a dent in in them being able to sleep we were playing some like seasonal music
00:43:38
Speaker
And I don't know what it was about the song, but the dogs just like tuned into it. And one of them starts, like one of them will start howling. And it's like a wolf pack. They like slowly build and they all start howling. So crazy. Just totally wild. David Tai also faced the problem of sorting out behaviors when evaluating whether animals preferred his music to that of the great human-loved composers like Mozart.
00:44:02
Speaker
It was kind of funny that looking for the behaviors that we would look for, I wrote a letter that was kind of presumptuous, actually very, I didn't even know it at the time, about what to look for to Dr. Snowden. And he was very polite in his response saying, basically, we studied for years about looking for animal behaviors. We'll take care of that part of it. We know what to look for.
00:44:27
Speaker
And so the thing is that those tamarind monkeys, it's an endangered species, and it's not possible to touch them or contact them. You can't take any readings off of them. And so it had to be entirely done by observing behaviors.
00:44:44
Speaker
And my first thought was, well, if you look into an audience, you're playing Mozart. Can you tell by looking at them who's enjoying the Mozart and who's not? So that's why I created two different kinds of music, music that was designed to get them riled up. It was kind of like Tamarin heavy metal music, you might say. And then another kind of music that was designed to calm them down.
00:45:09
Speaker
And that was a bigger trick, actually, because the tamarind monkeys' defensive maneuvering is that they're hopping around and chirping and communicating all the time, because if they are aware of a predator, then the predator is not a danger to them.
00:45:25
Speaker
And so they're constantly moving around. So to get them to settle down and do things like grooming and these are the behaviors they looked for to see if they were calming, getting calmed down. And so that was a bit of a trick, but I'm happy to say that the music to get them excited got them excited and the music meant to calm them down, calmed them down.
00:45:48
Speaker
It feels as if we can only get so far in terms of understanding how animals might make music or respond to music that we make for them. David Tai has thought about this probably more than anyone else. My brother explained to me that Wittgenstein had these open concept and closed concept terms and art.
00:46:07
Speaker
is an open concept, and basically once you define it, it loses its meaning, you will always find something that is an exception to your definition, but that everybody agrees is art. I think music may be able to be in that kind of open concept, but it seems to me that it would qualify as music, although truthfully, you know, the designation doesn't really matter that much to me.
00:46:33
Speaker
Music isn't something that we humans just listen to. We make music and sometimes it has a specific purpose in terms of how we communicate. What about other animals? Are there other animals that need to sing, that need to make music as a part of their fundamental biology?
00:46:50
Speaker
And of course it's hard to know what animals are thinking and feeling, but you can be sure that this singing in birds is of their very essence. It's something they must do to live. And among those who measure such things, you know, when these birds are captured and measured when they sing, you know, they're releasing dopamine, they enjoy singing, they're getting some pleasure from the process. But if you study as an observer,
00:47:18
Speaker
like the whole life cycle of an animal, you realize this is an essential thing that they do. And we as outsiders can tap into it, we can interact with it, but on their own, they're doing this because they need to and they must. I mean, who knows what the inner life of a mockingbird or a indigo bunting is, but one thing's for sure, they need to sing. They are making music.
00:47:45
Speaker
Not every musician thinks about how their tools might be applied to other species. And most of us don't even consider music something relevant to how we interact with our pets or other animals around us. Maybe that's a hole in music education.
00:48:01
Speaker
Studying the music of the animal world should be an essential part of all music education. Everyone should have to reckon with it just how in art you study anatomy, you sketch landscapes and still lives, you deal with the natural world. It should just be part of the basic stuff like humans
00:48:20
Speaker
evolved and developed music and it came from a life evolving in the world of animals making music and we don't understand everything about this music but the more we listen the more we experiment the more we think about it the more we'll connect ourselves more to this environment that's so essential to us and everybody give it a shot see what you can come up with they don't have to just learn our songs to be considered musical we have to learn the way they are thinking musically that's the challenge
00:48:50
Speaker
Thanks for listening to this episode of Cadence. You can find us online at the ensembleproject.com slash cadence, or wherever you get your podcasts. And you can support us at patreon.com slash cadence podcast. Cadence is produced by Adam Isaac and me, Andrey Viscontis. We also created and write the show. And this episode has been edited by Bailey Trier-Weiler with Uptown Works.
00:49:14
Speaker
Our intro and outro come from acclaimed New Zealand producer Rian Sheehan. Additional production help for this episode came from Katie Lindhart and Scott Lowry. You can find me on Twitter at intravis. Cadence is generously supported by the Germanagos Foundation.