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?)
Is music a universal language or is our appreciation of it uniquely tied to human cognitive evolution? Some basic components of musicality appear shared across species, but the full human experience of music is probably ours alone.
It sort of relates to the evo-devo playground work. If listening evolved for specific reasons in specific species, and if musical appreciation is downstream of those reasons, then what does it mean to design a reward function for evolving acoustic perception?