Move over Mozart: Study shows cats prefer their own beat

Date:

March 10, 2015

Source:

University of Wisconsin-Madison

Summary:

As more animal shelters, primate centers and zoos start to play music for their charges, it's still not clear whether and how human music affects animals. Now, a study shows that while cats ignore our music, they are highly responsive to "music" written especially for them.

Continued ...

Cows make more milk when listening to slow jams

In easily the most important agricultural news, if not world news, of the day, it has emerged that slow jams can stimulate milk production in cows.

A report in Modern Farmer links a study by the University of Leicester that found that slow music can mitigate stress in cows and increase the amount of milk they produce by 3% with anecdotal evidence from several dairy corporations.

"In terms of music, in my 30 years working with dairy cows, I have found that music can be beneficial to the well-being of the cows, but it must be consistent and calming," said Juan Velez, executive vice president of Aurora Organic Farms.

Continued

Rhesus Monkeys Cannot Hear the Beat in Music

Dec. 13, 2012 — Beat induction, the ability to pick up regularity -- the beat -- from a varying rhythm, is not an ability that rhesus monkeys possess. These are the findings of researchers from the University of Amsterdam (UvA) and the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), which have recently been published in the scientific journal PLOS ONE.

The research conducted by Henkjan Honing, professor of Music Cognition at the UvA, and a team of neurobiologists headed by Hugo Merchant from the UNAM, shows that rhesus monkeys cannot detect the beat in music, although they are able to detect rhythmic groups in music. The results of this research support the view that beat induction is a uniquely human, cognitive skill and contribute to a further understanding of the biology and evolution of human music.

Monkey versus human

It seems a trivial skill: children that clap along with a song, musicians that tap their foot to the music, or a stage full of line dancers that dance in synchrony. And in way, it is indeed trivial that most people can easily pick up a regular pulse from the music or judge whether the music speeds up or slows down. However, the realisation that perceiving this regularity in music allows us to dance and make music together makes it less trivial a phenomenon.

Continued:  http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/12/121213084933.htm

Woodbridge: Farmers claim playing music to their pigs helps them grow

We know that talking to plants is meant to help them grow.

But now farmers claim playing music to their animals helps them thrive.

A survey carried out by RSPCA Freedom Food found that 70% of farmers in the east of England play music, radio or sing to their animals because it keeps them calm and settled.

The theory is backed up by research carried out at Essex-based Writtle College which suggests that playing a radio tuned into a pop music or chat station can have a positive effect on sow and piglet behaviour, by increasing sow suckling and making them more playful.

Suffolk pig farmer Mark Hayward of Dingley Dell Pork in Woodbridge has taken it one step further and has his own house band the Broadside Boys, which plays live music to his pigs.

He said: “We often sit on the hay bales, singing and strumming to our Freedom Food pigs and i’m convinced they love it. And when the bands not playing we have music on all the time, coming from the tractors or my truck.

“It’s really important to be relaxed and calm around farm animals because they respond to your mood and in turn become more chilled out too. Music and also talking to our animals is a key part of that. I chat away to my breeding sows all the time, although the piglets are often too busy to stay still long enough to listen.”

The survey found that Radio 2 was the most popular station choice to play to animals, while six farmers said they sing hymns, Rugby songs and Bon Jovi tracks to their animals.

RSPCA farm animal scientist, Dr Marc Cooper, said: “Chatting to farm animals may sound daft but there is a clear welfare message behind Freedom Food’s survey. The farmers said that their animals are more content, relaxed and calm when they interact with them in this way. Like our pets, farm animals are intelligent, sentient beings and respond well to positive interaction.”

Here’s a list of pig farm favourites:

Brawn to be Wild – Steppenwolf

Twist and Snout – The Beatles

Swilling Me Softly – The Fugees

When the Going Gets Trough – Billy Ocean

Trotter round the Clock – Bill Haley & The Comets

For Pork Pies Only – Sheena Easton

Love is a Boar – Barbara Streisand

Lucy in The Sty with Diamonds – The Beatles

Chop in the name of Love – The Supremes

We have all the Swine in the World – Louis Armstrong

From Rasher with Love – Matt Munro

The Loin Sleeps Tonight – Tight Fit

Bacon the USSR – The Beatles

Gammon Baby Light my Fire – The Doors

http://www.ipswichstar.co.uk/news/woodbridge_farmers_claim_playing_music_to_their_pigs_helps_them_grow_1_1413292

Music Rocks with Cries from Wilderness

The Screaming Marmots aren't a rock band, but shrieks of the large rodents are telling scientists something about the animal nature of some music.

Daniel Blumstein, a biologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, studies marmots, a group that includes groundhogs, and he noticed something interesting about their cries.

"The pups sometimes scream when we capture them," said Blumstein, professor and chairman of UCLA's department of ecology and evolutionary biology. "These cries are very different than other vocalizations, like the alarm calls, we've studied."

Now he and colleagues have found evidence that human listeners can be aroused by the characteristics of music that resemble animals' distress calls.


"When we hear music, a lot of the mechanisms in our brain that are helping us understand it are probably originally designed to perceive emotions in voices, so music sort of fulfills that role of being an emotional voice," said study researcher Gregory Bryant, an assistant professor of communication at UCLA. 


Bryant and Peter Kaye, a musician at Kingston University in Surrey, England, composed 12 brief clips of otherwise benign-sounding music that incorporated the unpredictable, or nonlinear, characteristics of animal cries. These included sudden shifts in pitch and distortion, similar to the guitar effects common in rock music.

Continued:  http://www.livescience.com/20918-animal-cries-music.html

Animal Psychologists Discover What Music Pets Prefer

Many pet owners leave their home radios playing all day for the listening pleasure of their dogs and cats. Station choices vary. "We have a very human tendency to project onto our pets and assume that they will like what we like," said Charles Snowdon, an authority on the musical preferences of animals. "People assume that if they like Mozart, their dog will like Mozart. If they like rock music, they say their dog prefers rock."

Against the conventional wisdom that music is a uniquely human phenomenon, ongoing research shows that animals actually do have the capacity for music. But rather than liking classical or rock,Snowdon, an animal psychologist at the University 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 specially designed using the pitches, tones and tempos that are familiar to their particular species.

With no pun intended, music is all about scale: Humans like music that falls within our acoustic and vocal range, uses tones we understand, and progresses at a tempo similar to that of our heartbeats. A tune pitched too high or low sounds grating or ungraspable, and music too fast or slow is unrecognizable as such.

To animals, human music falls into that grating, unrecognizable category. With vocal ranges and heart rates very different from ours, they simply aren't wired to enjoy songs that are tailored for our ears. Studies show that animals generally respond to human music with a total lack of interest. With this general rule in mind, Snowdon has worked with cellist and composer David Teie to compose music that is tailored to suitthem.

Back in 2009, the researchers composed two songs for tamarins — monkeys with vocalizations three octaves higher than our own and heart rates twice as fast. The songs sound shrill and unpleasant to us, but they seem to be music to the monkeys' ears. The song modeled on excited monkey tones and a fast tempo made the tamarins visibly agitated and active. By contrast, they calmed down and became unusually social in response to a "tamarin ballad," which incorporated happy monkey tones and a slower tempo.

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

"We have some work-in-progress where we'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 Little Mysteries. "We find that cats prefer to listen to the music composed in their frequency range and tempo rather than human music."

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

Read on:  http://news.yahoo.com/animal-psychologists-discover-music-pets-prefer-194004250.html

Pigeon poopers spoil Kings of Leon gig

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/breaking/2010/0726/breaking21.html

Pigeon poopers spoil Kings of Leon gig

Kings of Leon abandoned a concert due to pigeon droppingsKings of Leon abandoned
a concert due to pigeon droppings

American rock band Kings of Leon said they were forced to abandon a concert in
St Louis, Missouri, at the weekend after three songs because pigeons kept
pooping on them from the rafters.

The band left the stage at the Verizon Wireless Amphitheater on Friday after
bass player Jared Followill was hit in the face by one dropping.

"Jared was hit several times during the first two songs. On the third song, when
he was hit in the cheek and some of it landed near his mouth, they couldn't deal
any longer," the Nashville band's publicist, Any Mendelsohn, said in a statement.

"It's not only disgusting - it's a toxic hazard. They really tried to hang in
there."

Drummer Nathan Followill apologised on Twitter to fans of the Grammy-winning
band which is made up of three Followill brothers and their cousin Matthew who
plays lead guitar.

"So sorry St Louis. We had to bail, pigeons s***ing in Jared's mouth and it was
too unsanitary to continue," he wrote. "Don't take it out on Jared . . . Sorry
for all who (travelled) many miles."

The band will continue its US tour in Cleveland, Ohio, today to promote their
fourth album Only By The Night before heading to Canada and Britain.