EPISODE 133
ANIMALS AND MUSIC PT. 2
HOST- Jeremy Burns, Matthew Scott Phillips
GENRE- Special Topics
DURATION- 57:37
BUMPER MUSIC-"Beats in the Belfry" (Area 47 Music)
ANNOUNCER- Mike Cunliffe
LISTEN
DESCRIPTION
We, at Music Student 101, believe that music is truly a common language! We wonder how it effects our animal friends. We wonder if some form of music exists among our animal friends. Join us as we discuss elephants, rodents, bats, crocodiles and mosquitoes!
ELEPHANTS
-The low tones and rumbles of elphants carry over far distances and carry a lot of information. In a study from Cornell University, researchers used a machine learning computer model to analyze 400 call and responses from elephants in Kenya. They were able to determine which elephant was making the call and which ones were the intended receivers. From these analyses they were able to determine that certain calls may include identifying sounds for specific elephants. They also found the these identifier calls are passed down from mother to calve, suggesting a parent to child naming system.
-Richard Lair (National Elephant Institute) and Dave Soldier (American musician) have a refuge in Northern Thailand where they have trained 14 elephants to play various instruments. Whistles, horns, drums, bass, gongs and other percussion and metallophones are utilized by these noble creatures as they play along to Richard's conducting. The money they make from their performances go back to the refuge. Lair, Soldier and the rest of the herd put out a self titled debut, "The Thai Elephant Orchestra", in 2002. They followed with "Elephonic Rhapsodies" and "Water Music" in the following years and then they released a greatest hits album in 2015. Check them out and support the elephants!
RODENTS
-There has been a recent interest in the use of music in healthcare. Compareed to prescription medicine, music is relatively inexpensive, easy to administer and rarely produces negative side effects. We often test medicines and techniques for human use on mice and rates.
-In 1998 a study by Frances H. Rauscher, Desix Robinson and Jason Jens from the University of Wisconsin determined that exposure to certain types of music can enhance their maze learning capabilities. They had 90 rats dived into 3 groups of 30. From in utero to 60 days after their birth rats were exposed to A-Mozart (K. 448), B-Phillip Glass (Music with Changing Parts) and C-white noise. After this they ran an experiment for 5 days with 3 trails a day for completion of a maze. By day 3, the Mozart rats were out performing the Glass and white noise rats (these two held the same results). The Mozart rats completed these mazes in less time with fewer errors.
-The most common cause for depression is stress. In 2023 a group of researchers from the Minzu University in Beijing China ran a study that suggests music prevents stress-induced depression and anxiety like behavior in mice. There were 4 groups of mice all aged 7 weeks. A-Control, B-Stressed out group, C-Music (mainly classical music for 1.5 hours in the evening), and D-Stressed + Music. Stress was introduced to the daily lives of these mice through means of night illumination, suppressed feeding, cage tilting, extended physical restraint, swimming in cold water, etc. These actions would lead to behavior indicative of anxiety or depression in mice (reduced grooming, decreased appetite and lethargy). The study results found the mice exposed to music at night displayed fewer signs of anxiety under these stresses compared to those that weren’t. This was inspired by the average human work day.
BATS
-Bats use echolocation to find their way around in the dark and to zero in on the bugs that would fill their bellies. They make calls which radiate outward and bounce off of near by objects and return back to their listening ears giving astounding detail about their surroundings. Humans can hear a frequency range of about 20Hz to 20kHz (basically a 20kHz range). Bats communicate and echolocate on a range of 11kHz to 212 kHz (10x greater than ours).
-In 2010, audio recordings observed by the Wildlife Conservation Society Canada revealed a never before heard type of bat call. The silver-haired bat, which is the most common species in the forests of US and Canada, was delivering a call with chirps so quickly that they didn’t provide enough time for the echoes to return. So this wasn’t for getting around in the dark. Research biologist Cori Lausen describes this bat song as “a lead call followed by a droplet call, and finishing with a series of multiple chirp calls”. Just by audio recording, they can’t tell wether these were male or female calls. But they do know that they were happening an awful lot during mating season, suggesting attempts to woo among bats.
CROCODILES
-The crocodile is a bit stubborn in its evolution, which hasn’t really budged a whole lot over the past 200 million years. According to researcher Mehdi Behroozi, they constitute a link between the birds of today and the dinosaurs of yesterday. In 2018, researchers at the Ruhr-University Bochum hooked 5 nile crocodiles up to an MRI for several trails. the idea was that these analyses could provide a better understanding of the evolution of the nervous system for certain species. One of the many differences between birds and crocodiles, is that birds use their songs for a variety of purposes. Crocodiles don’t really have a song to speak of and they don’t show a lot of emotion. So hooking up these nile crocodiles to an MRI was the best way to see how they respond to music. It turns out the brains of birds and crocodiles show very similar responses to The Brandenburg Concerto vs a simple frequency emitted by a tone generator. This is a curiosity because birds create and respond to their own sophisticated music. But crocodiles, not so much.
MOSQUITOES
-A joint study that was published in the journal Acta Tropica determined that when mosquitoes are listening to dubstep, specifically “Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites” by Skrillex, they bite less, feed at lower levels and mate less. This song was chosen for its broad band coverage of the frequency range (plenty of extreme low, mid and high frequencies). They were testing the breed of mosquitos known to carry yellow fever. The male mosquitos can identify females by the lower frequency of their buzzing wings. Their courting ritual consists of the two raising and lowering their pitches until their frequencies match up. So the issue was that this particular background music was disrupting this audio based courting ritual. In addition to decrease sex drives, they noticed a lower occurrence of feeding activity. While the music of Skrillex may lower your chances of contracting yellow fever, scientist still highly recommend other more proven repellents.
SOURCES