be.jazz comments
I also thought this was interesting, so I googled a bit. Below are some URLs with excerpts, divided into 1000-word chunks. (BTW Snoopy pointed out that it's never correct to say "cats and dogs):
http://www.hisf.no/njmt/
artikkel...elgrinde92.html
Music can have a mental effect on animals as well, exemplified by the study of Uetake et al. (1997) who demonstrated that dairy cows exposed to soothing music are more willing to be milked. There are various accounts of animals, such as birds, dogs and apes, that take a particular interest in music, but dogs who "join in" when people sing probably do so because they have a tendency to howl with the pack rather than because they enjoy the particular song. Likewise, those species of birds that have an innate tendency to imitate sounds may imitate music, but this is probably not driven by the kind of enjoyment we feel.
The more common effect seen on animals is one of music being soothing or relaxing. It seems fair to assume that the intense emotional response to music is a specific human trait, which probably evolved during the last few million years.
http://www.abc.net.au/science/fe...sic/
default.htm
Some researchers take the next step and say an ear for music goes back much further than Homo sapiens. As evidence they point to neurological studies of the human brain as it responds to music. PET scans of people listening to music have confirmed what many music lovers already know, that music elicits a response in that part of the brain that deals with our emotions.
As a recent issue of Scientific American pointed out, our emotional nerve centre - the limbic system - is an evolutionarily ancient part of our brain, and one which we share with much of the animal kingdom. Our limbic system's response to music suggests that there is a deep evolutionary significance in our musical behaviour. As Patricia Gray, head of the Biomusic program at the National Academy of Sciences in the U.S. suggests, it seems that the roots of human music lie much closer to our "lizard brain" than to our more recent reasoning cortex.
She proposes that music has a more ancient origin even than human language.
More evidence for the ancient providence of music comes from the fact that other animals make music, and that it is sometimes very similar to our own. Humpback whales for example sing complicated songs displaying rhythm, rhyme, and a compositional structure that can be found in the pop songs of Kylie Minogue. In other words, they make music that is very like our own, yet humans and whales last shared a twig on the family tree 60 million years ago. Patricia Gray suggests that this makes humans not the inventors of music, but rather latecomers to the party.
http://www.apa.org/divisions/div...s/
bradshaw.html
With 4 month old human infants, Tramo (2001) reported preferences, indexed by for example turning biases, for consonant musical intervals (involving major and minor thirds) compared to dissonant intervals (minor seconds). Such findings are paralleled in animal studies. All this suggests that our auditory systems for processing music may have originally evolved for communicatory purposes; indeed, music, like language, is an acoustically-based form of communication with a set of rules for combining a limited number of sounds in an infinite number of ways.
Also interesting:
http://cogweb.ucla.edu/Abstracts...s/
Music_00.html
http://www.hisf.no/njmt/
bookrevi...ew_2001012.html
Thanks for all that, g. I'll be checking it out.
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