Do Animals Like When You Sing to Them

What Type of Music Do Pets Like?

(Epitome credit: <a href="http://image.shutterstock.com/display_pic_with_logo/54706/54706,1194802914,ii/stock-photo-gilt-retriever-dog-with-a-wireless-headset-listening-music-6870532.jpg">Dog image</a> via Shutterstock)

Many pet owners get out their home radios playing all day for the listening pleasure of their dogs and cats. Station choices vary. "Nosotros accept a very homo tendency to project onto our pets and assume that they volition similar what we like," said Charles Snowdon, an authorization on the musical preferences of animals. "People presume that if they like Mozart, their dog will like Mozart. If they similar rock music, they say their domestic dog prefers rock."

Against the conventional wisdom that music is auniquely man miracle, recent and ongoing research shows that animals actually do share our capacity for it. Just rather than liking classical or stone, Snowdon, an creature psychologist at the Academy of Wisconsin-Madison, has discovered that animals march to the beat of a different drum altogether. They enjoy what he calls "species-specific music": tunes peculiarly designed using the pitches, tones and tempos that are familiar to their item species.

With no pun intended, music is all well-nigh calibration: Humans like music that falls within our acoustic and vocal range, uses tones nosotros understand, and progresses at a tempo similar to that of our heartbeats. A melodypitched too loftier or low sounds grating or ungraspable, and music too fast or slow is unrecognizable every bit such.

To most animals, homo music falls into that ungraspable, unrecognizable category. With vocal ranges and heart rates very dissimilar from ours, they simply aren't wired to appreciate songs tailored for our ears. Most studies find that, try equally we might to get their legs thumping, animals generally respond to homo music with a total lack of interest. That'due south why Snowdon has worked with cellist and composer David Teie to compose music that is tailored to suitthem.

Back in 2009, the researchers equanimous two songs for tamarins — monkeys with vocalizations 3 octaves higher than our ain and eye rates twice every bit fast. The songs sound shrill and unpleasant to us, just they seem to be music to the monkeys' ears. The song modeled on excited monkey tones and set to a fast tempo made the tamarins visibly agitated and agile. By contrast, they calmed down and became unusually social in response to a "tamarin ballad," which incorporatedhappy monkey tones and a slower tempo.

Snowdon and Teie have moved on to composing music for cats, and studying how they reply to it.

"We have some piece of work-in-progress where nosotros've transposed music and put it in the frequency range for cat vocalizations, and have used their resting heart rate, which is faster than ours," he told Life's Picayune Mysteries. "We find that cats prefer to listen to the music composed in their frequency range and tempo rather than human being music."

On the basis of their results, Teie has started selling cat songs online (at $1.99 per vocal) through a company called "Music for Cats."

Dogs are a tougher audition, mostly because breeds vary widely in size, vocal range and eye rate. However, big dogs such as Labradors or mastiffs take vocal ranges that are quite similar to those of adult male humans. "So, it is possible that they might exist responsive to music in our frequency range. My prediction is that a large dog might be more responsive to human music than a smaller dog such as a Chihuahua," Snowdon said. [Dogs Play the Pianoforte in New Video]

Indeed, some dogs practice announced to respond emotionally to human being music. Inquiry led past Deborah Wells, a psychologist at Queen's University Belfast, shows that dogs can discern between human music of different genres. "Our own inquiry has shown that dogs certainly behave differently in response to different types of music, e.g., showing behaviors more suggestive of relaxation in response to classical music and behaviors more suggestive of agitation in response to heavy metal music," Wells wrote in an e-mail.

Because the great demand for new ways to please our pets, more progress is probable to be made in the field of animal music. But no matter how well composers perfect their dog, cat and monkey songs, the animals volition probably never capeesh their species-specific music quite as much ashumans appreciate ours. According to Snowdon, they lack an of import musical power that we possess: relative pitch.

"We can recognize that a sequence of notes is the same whether it'southward in the key of F or A apartment," he said. "I have found that animals take very good absolute pitch, only they don't take relative pitch. They can learn to recognize a sequence of notes, merely if you lot transpose the notes to a dissimilar key, so that the sequence uses the same relative notes but the key is different, they tin't recognize the relationships between the notes anymore."

He added, "To that extent, we understand music in a dissimilar way than animals do."

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Natalie Wolchover was a staff writer for Live Science from 2010 to 2012. She hold a bachelor's degree in physics from Tufts University and has studied physics at the University of California, Berkeley. Follow Natalie on Google+.