Do animals understand music or is it just noise to them?

[Dinosaursandanime65]

I also finished this, Ntino Drako’s Dragon Bolt Form. I wonder how you people Willa react seeing him and Jahnazu for the first time not saying anything and Ntino just turns into this.

Updates

+1 y

I’m getting closer to finishing coloring the cover page for my first book

[FlyingDutchman670]

Can animals understand music? In the sense of being aware that sound waves are hitting their ears, absolutely. Can they feel music? Most likely not in these sense that you and I feel music. Much of the feeling that we associate with music is learned. There are of course elements of music, or more accurately certain sounds that are universally associated with certain feelings (generally fear), but the vast majority of feeling and emotion that arises out of the net structure and movement of music is learned.

A very basic illustration of this: play a loud blast of shrieking instruments, and you will freak out humans and many animals alike. Now play a classical funeral dirge you remember from you grandpa's funeral and you may find yourself crying while your Chinese neighbor and your pet dog look at you funny.

Even a great deal of musical "understanding" or processing is learned. When British colonists first arrived in Africa, they wrote of how the music of native tribes they encountered sounded chaotic, incomprehensible, not musical at all. Were the natives banging randomly on drums like barbarians? No, their musical language was simply so vastly different, their rhythms so complicated, that the brains of the colonists were simply not hearing the patterns. Their brains were looking for something in the music to latch on to that didn't exist, because they were used to a very different set of patterns of stimuli.

On a small/local scale this partially explains why your parents think your music is incomprehensible. Their musical environment was different from your by virtue of time, possibly location as well. As a result their brain's musical vocabulary is very different from yours. You understand what your music is doing. But their brain is tuned to different patterns.

There's no direct experiments on animals I can think of, but given what we do know about music across cultures, it's likely that animals probably hear a mishmash of sounds rather than anything musical.

*edit... I think replacing instances of "hear" with "perceive" in my explanation will improve understanding of what I'm getting at.

[Dinosaursandanime65]

Stupendous analysis

[NamerOfStars]

Yes, sort of- particularly the more intelligent ones, like (other) apes and elephants. And the cetaceans- well, they have their own music, and dolphins even their own languages. I don't know how they'd react to ours; being in water changes the experience of hearing sound. An interesting question. Corvids (the third group of superintelligent animals), I don't think I've read anything about, so far as music goes.

[SnowedIn]

I don't have any sense of the answer to your question but the picture is AMAZING.

[SlothySlob]

I don't exactly know if there have been studies done about this, but there are examples (videos) of animals reacting to music in the way you'd expect.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFKTEaq-WA4

[Dinosaursandanime65]

The elephants Omega LoL