ABSTRACT
The comparative study of music perception and cognition across animal species, sometimes termed “zoomusicology” or “biomusicology,” is a relatively young field of research (Doolittle & Gingras, 2015; Gingras, 2014; Hoeschele, Merchant, Kikuchi, Hattori, & ten Cate, 2015). Musicians, including celebrated composers such as Janequin or Messiaen, have evoked or imitated birdsong for a long time, and scholars regularly transcribed birdsongs using musical notation. However, it is only since the last century that the scientific study of animal sound production and perception has flourished, thanks largely to the development of modern recording and audio analysis techniques, as well as the emergence of the discipline of comparative psychology in the wake of Charles Darwin’s influential contributions. Today, it is a thriving research area which, along with the closely allied field of evolutionary musicology, seeks to identify possible biological bases of musicality and to propose a plausible, empirically supported account of the origins of music.
