Section D 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 laboratoryanimals 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 recognise 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 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 sound the way we do, we'd need evidence that they don't respond to "music"
constructed from their own sound environment.
Section E 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