Do singing animals only do it to find mates and mark their territory — or perhaps also, like us, simply because they enjoy it? 🎤🐒
Two creatures sing sweetly to each other, exchanging a series of trills, cheeps and chirps. If you close your eyes and listen, you might believe you are hearing two birds. But you'd be mistaken. In fact, this is the vocal repertoire of a pair of Alston's singing mice , diminutive rodents that are found in the cloud forests of Central America and communicate by singing passionately to their companions.
This definition is a highly subjective, human one. But singing is a"shorthand way for us to talk about a certain subset of animal signals that sound very musical to us," said Charles Snowdon, a primatologist and emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison who studies how animals communicate and animals' relationship to music. When we apply this definition, we start to uncover the hidden divas of the natural world.
Meanwhile, no conversation about singing would be complete without the haunting melodies of the humpback whale . In 1970, American biologist Roger Payne captivated the public imagination when he carried out the first recordings of whale songs on vinyl and distributed them far and wide. The soulful songs made such an impact, in fact, that they are credited with helping to spur momentum against whaling through the 1970s, which eventually resulted in a near-worldwide moratorium, Farrell said.
But beyond these functional roles, do any animals sing just for the sheer joy of it? Here, there are no hard-and-fast answers. But we do know that animals play and that they have"emotional lives," Farrell said."Those two things are established, and there are very large literatures on them," he said. And there is also mounting evidence that animals have an emotional response to music.
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