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Why are animals important in biomedical research?

Is there any research on why animals seem to not understand music?

  • Humans dance, bounce their heads, tap their feet to the beat. Animals seem unfazed – annoyed – by the extraneous noise.

  • Answer:

    Yes. It turns out that elephants as well as parrots and several other species of birds can spontaneously respond to rhythmic music by "dancing" (as seen on YouTube). Of these species, at least cockatoos and grey parrots will adjust the frequency of their motions if the beat of the music is altered, suggesting that they are really responding to the music's rhythm. Elephants, humans, and parrots are phylogenetically very distant, and there are many species in between us and parrots that cannot dance to music. It has been observed that the ability to dance to music seems to coincide with the ability to mimic sounds, which suggests that these two abilities might be related.

Melinda T. Owens at Quora Visit the source

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Scientists created "music" for monkeys re-purposing the sounds monkeys typically make as alarm calls or soothing monkey noises.  Monkeys do not respond favorably to music created by and for humans, but they had a visible response to the monkey music, getting upset or calmed by the music based on their own calls.  It doesn't seem unreasonable to conclude that animals with languages (and the ability to produce sounds) so disparate from ours would find different types of sounds favorable. http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/09/monkeymusic/

Carla Sette

Yes, animals DO respond to music. See http://www.fourhourbody.com/snowball, or search YouTube for "snowball the dancing cockatoo."

Jane Huang

I'm not sure we can really know what animals 'understand' so this would really be an exercise in trying to understand why humans interpret their observations of animal behaviour in the way that they do. For the most part I would suggest that a lot of it comes from projection of our own experiences onto others , whether in an anthropomorphic way or its opposite.

Andy Roberts

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