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Animals Like Music. What Would Your Pet Listen To?

What would your pet like to listen to?
What would your pet like to listen to?

I'd like to think that my big, old black lab would enjoy a little old-school funk (he was named for trumpet legend Maceo Parker). And, given that he's grown up with a house full of kids, I think he might be willing to put up with a bit of The Backyardigans as well. But University of Wisconsin-Madison animal psychologist Charles Snowdon says that, when it comes to pets and music, I'm dead wrong.

While research shows that animals do have the ability to enjoy music, "We have a very human tendency to project onto our pets and assume that they will like what we like," Snowdon told Life's Little Mysteries. "People assume that if they like Mozart, their dog will like Mozart. If they like rock music, they say their dog prefers rock."



What they do like, he says, is music that's made especially to their ears -- that is, using the sounds with which a given species is already familiar. Just as our parents thought the music we loved as a teen just sounded like horrible, grating noise, our pets don't particularly like sounds that are pitched too high or too low, too fast or too slow, for their vocal ranges and heart rates. And most of the stuff humans like to listen to make our pets wish they could tell us to turn it down. (Instead, though, they usually just ignore it.)

That explains why our dog doesn't like the dulcet tones of our kids' favourite bands. But is there anything out there that they'd actually like to listen to?


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Snowdon and cellist/composer David Teie are teaming up on a series of tunes specifically geared to certain animals. They've created songs for tamarins (a type of monkey) that sounds "shrill and unpleasant" to people but is, well, music to the monkeys' ears. Now, they're working on some compositions for cats.

"We have some work-in-progress where we've transposed music and put it in the frequency range for cat vocalizations, and have used their resting heart rate, which is faster than ours," he said. (You can download songs for $1.99 each at Musicforcats.com.)

Up next: Dog tunes. But since dogs come in so many different sizes and breeds, they may respond to a wide range of musical sounds. "So, it is possible that they might be responsive to music in our frequency range. My prediction is that a big dog might be more responsive to human music than a smaller dog such as a Chihuahua," Snowdon said.

Which means that my big, old black lab just might like old-school funk after all.

What kind of music do you think your pet would like?



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