When some birds listen to the music, they will sing. Why? Will they sing when heard other birds(different species) singing? How about other animals, like dolphin, bat, insect and monkey?
Interesting topic! I have found animal communication in general to be a fascinating subject and a great deal has been written on this! On the "why" of animal response, there can only be speculation - but clearly animals respond to all kinds of sounds - including human-made music. One might assume that there are neural pathways that recognize or are able to at least distinguish between sounds that are response-worthy and those sounds that should not be responded to. For example, anything that could be a mating advertisement or an alarm call should elicit the appropriate response, otherwise, natural selection will winnow that call out or that individual (that does not respond) out of the population. The topic is broad, but there must be some communicatory influence and it is almost surely along pathways shaped by natural selection - for either mate recognition, predation (alarm), or other reasons that would have evolved. Check out the great link below from MindFloss - this stuff is great!
http://mentalfloss.com/article/70539/7-scientific-studies-about-how-animals-react-music
Thank you, David. Many creatures respond to the sound they are familer with, like the sound of the same species, the alarm of danger and the noise made by the prey. When I play piano to 2 kinds of birds, they all sing a lot(sometimes the bullfrog also croaks). But they usually won't sing when the other species sing(no music). I guess the melody is similar to their song and they can distinguish other bird's song by their melody or the invariance of the melody. Maybe this is easy to understand(natural selection etc.). But as for the lark, this bird will imitate all kinds of sounds they heard, like meow, other bird's song and even fire alarm. On the other side, what kind of sound they will respond to or not may easy to explain, but what kind of sound they will like or not is hard to tell. I was wondering if there are some essential similarities within the sound animals like(or hate).
I want to ask u Tian, if ur question is because u see an interesting behaviour or just curiosity, because I think in birds the respond to music depends of a bird, family,genus or order. but I don|t sure if a individual of the same species could be response of different way .
I have seen some instances. Like Leiothrix lutea and Garrulax canorus, they will sing loudly when they heard Richard Clayderman's music, but keep silence before and after the music(different individuals at different time, they were the same). As for the Eremophila alpestris, I talked with some people who raise the bird, they said it's very important to keep the bird away from noise like meow, raven cry etc. Because they will learn and make sound like that, even the fire alarm, just like parrot imitate human speech.
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