Comment by mettamage

Comment by mettamage 2 hours ago

4 replies

I don't think it's only humans. All kinds of animals would benefit from knowing that awhoo comes from a wolf and that, in this example, awhoo awhoo is the same sound coming from the same wolf or that an animal recognizes that the first awhoo comes from one wolf and the second awhoo from another wolf.

It also helps for an animal to know the volume of these awhoos as it is a good proxy for closeness, and therefore danger. It's even a good thing to know the rhythm of these awhoos as it helps again to assess if these wolves, or wolf, is on the move while awhooing or on the move between awhoos.

And this is just one example I'm currently making up bit at least makes sense that for many animals: tempo, volume, rhythm, patterns in sound, it's needed for survival. So evolution will select for it.

Music is a lot more than just those things I think, but it at least shows some evolutionary backbone as to why I believe that more animals have been evolved to like music. At least, some elephants sure seem to enjoy a good piano [1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFIT87yPNYk

dr_dshiv 2 hours ago

Musical appreciation is almost shockingly absent from animals.

One possible reason is that allowing one’s nervous system to be entrained to external rhythms is potentially exploitable. So humans may have evolved the ability to “let the guard down.”

  • robot-wrangler an hour ago

    This is pretty fascinating, do you have anything else to say about it? Makes me think of mesmerism and snake-charmers, although IDK how real that is.

    Another thing that comes to mind is recent pop-sci talking about how individual bees can measure time pretty accurately, which I personally found very surprising, even though I've heard that they "dance" for communication.

    Rhythm appreciation is neurologically very interesting since it requires several basic abilities acting at once, including tracking time, but also a certain amount of memory and pattern recognition. Animal appreciation of melodic stuff and harmony is interesting too but seems much harder to study and more dependent on physical aspects of ears

  • [removed] an hour ago
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