Did Disney Get it Right the First Time?
A Study of Musicology within Other Members of the Kingdom Animalia
The focus of my research is to give evidence to the hypothesis that some animals appreciate aesthetics. Though the idea is not original, it has been given a fairly poor amount of study. Back in the 1920’s, German scientists subjected monkeys to human music, hoping to accomplish just what I have proposed. They played both classical music and heavy metal for monkeys, and the monkeys were shown to prefer classical music to heavy metal. However, in further studies, it was shown that the same monkeys prefered silence to the same classical music. After concluding the hypothesis that monkey’s didn’t like music, period, little was done to follow up on the research. Then a study conducted by one Charles Snowden working for WU-Madison came about. In these studies (back in 2009) featuring Tamarins, serious evidence was presented that provided a very reasonable explanation for the monkey’s “lack of taste.” When played music that based its major scale around their vocal range, a tempo around their normal metabolic tempo, and note lengths and chromatic directions (higher or lower pitch) based on their own “language,” the monkeys showed a definite preference to the music composed for them than to human music, or even silence. Simultaneously, an adjunct Professor of Musicology and Semiotics at Helsinki University began to publish several papers and a couple of books dedicated to the study of this unnamed field in an effort to get the scientific community to begin to research the subject. He dubbed the field “zoomusicology,” a term coined from F. B. Mâche’s Music, Myth, Nature by Peter Szöke in 1992.
The reason this study is relevant is because it provides a greater understanding of the psychology of life itself. Since Tamarins have already been studied in my proposed manner, I have proposed a test subject species based on acquirability and on their basic psychology: Rattus rattus (rats). Rattus rattus’s hearing range is approximately 200 kHz to 7600 kHz, with a heart rate between 330-480 beats per minute. Modifying Snowmen’s original experiment to account for differences acr ss species, I should be able to compose species-specific music that said subject should show a great appreciation for (hopefully).
My hypothesis is: if animals are capable of appreciating music, and cannot learn to appreciate human music because it falls outside of things relatable in their day-to-day lives, and if I play music composed for them and human music or silence simultaneously at different places around their living spaces, then said animals will spend more time in areas where music composed for them is playing opposed to areas with human music and silence.
My hypothesis is: if animals are capable of appreciating music, and cannot learn to appreciate human music because it falls outside of things relatable in their day-to-day lives, and if I play music composed for them and human music or silence simultaneously at different places around their living spaces, then said animals will spend more time in areas where music composed for them is playing opposed to areas with human music and silence.
~Bryant
No comments:
Post a Comment