Monday, May 11, 2026

Howtown asks 'What do other animals think of human music?'

I wrote, "I have some science involving animals and music penciled in...Stay tuned." Watch Howtown asking What do other animals think of human music?

Do animals actually like music — or are humans just projecting? In this episode of Howtown, we investigate the science of animals and music through experiments with cotton-top tamarins, orangutans, rats, mice, parrots, dogs, cats, and a wild fox who seemed captivated by a banjo.

We look at what animal behavior research, neuroscience, and music cognition can tell us about rhythm, pitch, melody, consonance, dissonance, emotion, reward, pattern recognition, and why human brains find music so powerful. Along the way, we explore studies on cotton-top tamarins preferring silence to human music, orangutans choosing silence over different music genres, rats conditioned to prefer Miles Davis, mice exposed to Beethoven during development, dogs howling along to favorite songs, and Snowball the cockatoo dancing to the beat.

Featuring conversations with researchers and musicians including Aniruddh Patel, Pralle Kriengwatana, David Teie, Suzanne MacDonald, and Andy Thorn, this episode asks: can animals hear music the way we do? Can they recognize rhythm or melody? Do they feel emotion from music? And what does animal music research reveal about the evolution of music in humans?
That's really cool, especially the stories told by David Teie about being inspired by Metallica into composing music for animals and Andy Thorn about playing banjo and attracting foxes. The former convinced me that saying "kitty, kitty, kitty" in a high-pitched voice actually works and isn't just an extension of "baby voice" for pets.

David Teie, pronounced "tay" instead of "tie," makes a cameo in Fact Quickie asking Do Dogs and Cats Like It if You Leave the TV or Music on for Them?

Ever wonder if your pets enjoy them some TV or music? Well, it turns out the answer is incredibly fascinating.

A survey of about 2000 British dog owners conducted in early 2017 found that around 40% of dog owners admitted to leaving the radio on when they left the house so that their dog wouldn’t be lonely, while another 32% admitted that they did the same thing, just with the TV. In yet another British study, this time in 2015, it was found that 38% of those respondents left the radio on and 22% the TV. Whichever study you look at there, this practice is shockingly common, at least in Britain. But do your pets like this?

Starting with our canine counterparts, while the research we have thus far isn’t exactly robust, it would appear that, at least in the case of music, yes, in some cases dogs do respond to this in a positive way. For example, consider the results of research conducted in 2002 by psychologist Deborah Wells from Queen’s University in Belfast. In a nutshell, Wells’ study involved randomly playing music through some speakers for a group of about 50 dogs at a re-homing shelter in the UK and noting what, if any, effect it had on the them. After a baseline reaction was found by observing the behaviour of the dogs when no music at all was playing, researchers then played one of three CDs- for those unfamiliar, a kind of round shiny object people used to store music and other data on, often used for playing music in their hitched up covered wagons. Each CD contained a curated playlist limited to a specific genre, in this case, pop, classical and heavy metal. Finally, a fourth CD contained the sounds of a human conversation.
The answer is that dogs do, but cats don't much care.

Speaking of cats, one of last year's top posts is about cats, so follow over the jump for a brief retrospective about it.


Web search contributed to Cats as a threat to biodiversity from February 11, 2013 earning 666 raw page views to tie for 44th overall with Jimmy Kimmel on GMOs: Student Sustainability Video Festival 58.

That's a wrap for today. Stay tuned for a short evergreen educational post tomorrow.

Previous posts in this series Previous retrospectives about the back catalog.
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