What do other animals think of human music?
Howtown, May 2026
A recent video exploring what other animals actually make of human music. Cotton-top tamarins prefer silence to human music. Orangutans also choose silence over most genres. Rats can be conditioned to prefer Miles Davis. Snowball the cockatoo dances to the beat. A wild fox seemed captivated by a banjo (but probably just has positive associations )
The broader question underneath all the animal experiments: is music a universal language or is our appreciation of it uniquely tied to human cognitive evolution? The answer seems to be somewhere in between - some basic components of musicality appear shared across species, but the full human experience of music is probably ours alone.
What I find interesting is the implication for the evo-devo playground work. If listening evolved for specific reasons in specific species, and if musical appreciation is downstream of those reasons, then designing a reward function for evolving acoustic perception isn't just a technical problem. It's a question about what listening was for in the first place.