MetaSB2. Can dogs hear music?

Discussion

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Reasons why dogs CANNOT hear music as music

The answer to the question can dogs hear music as music is "No." There are many good reasons to support this absolute denial.

It is true that dogs can hear the sounds during musical production, but this is insufficient since recognition of the sounds AS music is required. Or is it?

Suppose you are listening to very odd sounds as an average adult human. The sounds are highly unusual and occasionally drop out from your hearing altogether, and then they return. You can discern no particular pattern of musical interest to you during your experience of the sonic event. It turns out you were listening to ancient Martian music. The Martians had excellent hearing, even into the thirty thousand Hertz range beyond human hearing capacities. These Martian abilities to hear in higher frequencies explains the dropouts of sound while you were listening because you can only hear to around twenty thousand Hertz.

Did you just listen to and hear Martian music? Well, you definitely heard something, but did you hear music?

➢ Is it required that the individual hear it AS music to be perceiving music?

Consider a more down to Earth example. Suppose you have never heard Gamelan music. Here's a sample (click on it) thanks to YouTube.com, where you cannot only listen to it, but also learn its history: History of Gamelan Music. Some people may not recognize this as music but think it is just someone banging on metal. Suppose that happens. Did the person hear Gamelan music? Most people would answer, "Yes, the person heard Gamelan music, but they just didn't recognize it as music."

➢ Why can't the dog situation be like this one?

The reply is that the typical adult human has the capacity to hear music, even if they don't recognize it as music, but the dog does not have the relevant capabilities. The humans who did not understand what they were listening to might change their minds. Someone could explain to the person the history of Gamelan music, and music theorists could convince the person that what she is listening to has a lot of types of connections within and between the elements so that we can find comparable structures each supporting that the Gamelan sonic event is a musical product.

➢ So, what are the relevant capacities an individual needs to be capable of hearing music as music?

Behavioral evidence for the dog never hearing music as music is that no dog ever responds by dancing in rhythm to the music or has any other behavior that would suggest or indicate that the dog hears these sounds as music. Dogs don't have a favorite tune, for example.

➢ What are the requisite characteristics to qualify as a possible music perceiver?

We know for sure what counts as a satisfactory sufficient condition for music perception, and that is to have normal humans of adequate age and comprehension, and regular sensory abilities, such as can hear sounds. It is also probably required that the humans have been exposed to music and been informed that it is music so that there is a significant cultural input required for music perception.

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Reasons why cows CAN hear music as music

Surprising to the thesis that dogs 🐕 cannot hear music as music, it may well be that cows do because there is some evidence that may indicate such.

It turns out that when slow, soothing, and consistent music by Mozart or Simon and Garfunkel's "Bridge Over Troubled Water" or "Everybody Hurts" by R.E.M. is played to cows in their stalls, this increases milk production by 3%. The effect is not achieved with fast, disruptive music. Let us presume that these are established facts.

As philosophers, we can take off from here and find out what's true later. Suppose that milk production decreases when listening to intense Black Sabbath recordings. Would this show that cows don't like or enjoy listening to Black Sabbath over Mozart or R.E.M.? Well, it would not have to prove this. All we have agreed upon so far is which music increases or decreases milk production in cows. Yet, this by itself in these circumstances fails to prove that these are cow's preferences, meaning what they prefer when given a choice between two or more items.

To prove this, we know that if cows get small shocks of uncomfortable electric charge compared to much larger shocks that this will cause milk production to go down more than softer shocks. It does not follow that Bossie the cow prefers the more minor electric shocks since Bossie's preferences are for no electric shocks at all.

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➢ Are there any good examples of sounds perceived as music that most (humans) would reject those sounds as music if not for the musical intentions of the performers producing the sounds?

* Jack hammers: Listening to 12 hours of jackhammers is not likely going to sound like music to anyone. However, if Peter Gabriel, during his performance of his song "Sledgehammer," were to incorporate a jackhammer snippet in for percussive effects, then the same snippet of sound that most people (that's everybody really) would reject and deny was music, may now find within this musical context of the performance of "Sledgehammer" that these sledgehammer sounds count as music under these circumstances.

* Banging on can lids by a drummer intentionally making music using old plastic buckets upside down

* The Michigan State band playing "Ring in the Holidays/Carol of the Bells" using some sounds that workers produce at a construction worksite.

* Gene Kelly (middle height), Dan Dailey (tallest), and Michael Kidd tap-dancing starting at 2:06 minutes into the video clip in a musical way with trash can lids on one foot.

These are examples of manipulating for musical purposes sounds that typically are heard as non-musical. Consequently, these sounds in their more familiar environments may remain non-music. It is when they can be strung together in a musical way that they may seem musical, such as dog's woofs singing out "Jingle Bells."

* Perhaps another example that meets the criteria comes from the scenario envisaged in the Martian High-Frequency Objection. In this scenario, Martians can hear music that consists of high enough frequencies that no humans can listen to them. Therefore if the judges are human, they all agree they cannot hear any music playing. Thus, the criterion has been met. All humans agree they hear no music which satisfies the second criterion, yet Martians hear this high-frequency music as musical sounds. These then are sounds perceived as music by Martians that all non-enhanced human judges would reject as music (since they cannot perceive it with their ears alone).

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Reasons why cows CANNOT hear music as music

The question of whether cows can hear music as music turns out to be both a philosophical as well as a scientific question. We can start to resolve the philosophical question by determining what music is and what constitutes non-music and its exemplars.

It is difficult to characterize perceptual capabilities and their degrees of cognitive processing, from fully cognizant of one's consciousness, etc., to unconscious mental states to the even more unconscious non-mental states that constitute high-level cognitive/perceptual processing of, say, edge detection in the visual system.

Even limiting the question of music perception only to members of the species homo sapiens, when do humans, during their phylogenetic development, become perceivers of music?

It is said humans show interest in drumbeats may come from having listened to your mother's heartbeat while still in the womb before birth, and this fact is sure to be true of virtually all human fetuses who survive birth with normal hearing.

So, do babies perceive their mother's heartbeat as music? Not if the mother's heartbeat does not qualify as music, they don't.

Does a mother's heartbeat, as heard by most surviving fetuses, qualify as music so that it could be perceived as music?

What if we have conclusive reasons to think that a mother's heartbeat does not qualify as music? Does this prevent a perceiver from perceiving it as music?

Is there a difference between what qualifies as music and yet could still be perceived as music?

The answer to these last couple of questions is unclear.

Consider the made up scenario based on similar examples recorded in jazz history books on Charlie Parker's musical ears. Charlie Parker often listened to sounds as if they were in a musical context, as inspired from a true story where Parker might sometimes exclaim that was a B♭ after hearing a spoon dropped on a metal tray.

Yoko Ono's "Toilet piece/Unknown" where she uses flushing toilet sounds (presumably edited together), forcing one to reflect upon the musical aspects of sonic flushing events, perhaps even hearing it in a new way in a musical context embedded inside of what all agree counts as music, even if still not such great music, i.e., disliked by many as music.

The philosophical question becomes more scientific when we ask what cognitive and perceptual abilities normal humans have that permit them to perceive music as music.

People's perceptions of music as music has been achieved by people having poorer eyesight than 20/20 vision, so a visual acuity sensor, as in well-functioning eyeball is not presumed needed for music perception to occur.

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Resolving the scientific question of whether cows perceive music as music

We perform the following double-blind experiment. Play the cow's soothing sounds that are not music and see how this affects milk production. If one can achieve the same increases or decreases by playing non-musical sounds that are equivalent sonically to the musical ones and achieve the same milk production, then there is less reason to believe it was music rather than equivalent levels of non-music sounds.

OBJECTION: Whatever sounds make for lower stress and increased milk production in cows can always be claimed by supporters both to be music (the music and non-music soothing sounds) to the cow's ear. What humans judge and label as non-music sounds still can be claimed to be music to the cows 🐄 even though this begs the question against the contrary position. The contrary position maintains that IF the non-music to humans increases milk production, then it doesn't follow that cows hear the music AS music, when it is music to humans, but are only responding to soothing noises, but not to music per se.

Mosquitoes can be repelled or presumably attracted to certain frequencies, maybe sonic vibrations? If they can does anyone want to defend that it is music to their ears if they flock to either the non-musical OR the musical ones, as judged by humans? No.

Male mosquitoes are attracted to the vibrations made by the frequency generated by females beating wings that produce a sound like a tuning fork pitched to A.

“Riehle likes to demonstrate this effect to his students by passing a tuning fork pitched to A over a cage of female mosquitoes. In every test, the females do not react, he said. The same demonstration over the cage of male mosquitoes sets their wings in a flurry as they frantically search for the goddess who created those sweet, sweet vibrations.” (bold not in original)

If we play music to male mosquitoes 🦟 with a lot of A notes, the male mosquitoes are likely to respond. Does this mean they prefer music with the A notes over music with no A notes? No, it does not. It merely shows that male mosquitoes are attracted to the A frequency since this is the sound made by female wing beats and their species is biologically driven to mate. We should make a similar assessment for the cows if non-music soothing sounds makes them increase milk production. It is the soothing sounds—and not the music—that makes for increased milk production, or the hearing of an A frequency that stimulates male mosquitoes to seek out a female, but not the music (with a lot of A frequencies).

Ockham's razor and parsimony (simplicity) considerations require that one should prefer the explanation that cows do not perceive music as music if science can show that comparable non-musical sonic situations for cows have similar effects as music does on milk production.

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