Animal Psychology

I hadn't really thought about how animals "experience" music. But an article by Hadley Leggett in Wired Science makes sense to me. Here are the key bits:

Monkeys don’t care much for human music, but apparently they will groove to their own beat.

Previous experiments have shown that tamarin monkeys prefer silence to Mozart, and they don’t respond emotionally to human music the way people do. But when a psychologist and a musician collaborated to compose music based on the pitch, tone and tempo of tamarin calls, they discovered that the species-specific music significantly affected monkey behavior and emotional response.

“Different species may have different things that they react to and enjoy differently in music,” said psychologist Charles Snowdon of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who published the paper Tuesday in Biology Letters with composer David Teie of the University of Maryland. “If we play human music, we shouldn’t expect the monkeys to enjoy that, just like when we play the music that David composed, we don’t enjoy it too much.”

Indeed, the monkey music sounds shrill and unpleasant to human ears.

...

“I think that the most interesting thing that has come out of this study is some suggestions for animal care,” he said. “It’s very common for people to play music for animals that are in captivity, because they figure that they’ll be interested in it or enjoy it. But our work suggests that they aren’t that interested in human music or prefer not to listen to it at all.” However, if music was tailored specifically to the kinds of sounds that animals are used to hearing, McDermott thinks it might have a more positive effect.

I guess I'm like most people, I just assume my experiences are common. I believe that is generally true for other humans. I kinda knew it was not the case for animals, but I never thought about it much. This article makes the point.

Thomas Nagel wrote a famous essay in philosophy called "What is it Like to Be a Bat?". If you really want to get serious about what we experience and what others experience, that's a good place to start.