Music-loving animals

If you play a C followed by a D on the piano, the probability that your cat's subsequent meow will be exactly the same pitch as an E is about the same as a red car passing by after you have already seen a blue and a white one. However, considering that there are far fewer car colors than possible frequencies of cat meows, it is far less likely that your pet will continue the scale than that a motorcade will complete the colors of the tricolor. In order to get cats to follow the traditional pitch steps of human music, Pavlovian training methods could be used to learn thirds or fifths. However, the most commonly used method today remains video manipulation. This is more ethically justifiable, but supports the prejudice that animals are fundamentally irrelevant when it comes to music. Some Youtubers have uploaded videos with the title "cat perfect pitch" and waited for their cat to make a C sound. They then added this as the final note after the played series C-D-E-F-G-A-H. Or they adapted the meowing electronically to the played scale. What makes these little films so fascinating, even if they are fake, is that they feed the illusion - and thus underline the impossibility - that cats could have an idea of harmonic correctness. Unless they always meow at this pitch or are sufficiently trained. Assuming other "paw whisperer" hypotheses, the discussion could be taken a little further, disingenuously and more or less parodically: Perhaps cats don't meow at the right pitch because they have a completely different musical sensorium to us. Or maybe they don't want us to notice that they have a soft spot for Puccini operas. Or even: fortunately, they are not as stupid as humans, who consider absolute pitch to be a gift of nature.

Videos that play the gentle howling of a dog over autotune suggest that dog singing can only be perfect with technical support. The musicality of the animals therefore depends on special effects. The animal-plug-in combination is a 2.0 version of anthropomorphism that likes to limit itself in order to survive. The birds that sing best are not necessarily the most popular with those that are less good at it (to fit the hypothesis according to which "nature does not so much take back its rights as reinvent its tasks, to the extent that it obliges us to listen to the birds that sing less clearly, masked by the screamers"). {Note 1} In any case, the selection of songbirds is obviously based on human music criteria. François-Bernard Mâche puts them on a human scale: "Of the 8700 or so bird species, 4000 to 5000 are songbirds. Of these, 200 to 300 have such varied songs that they are musically interesting. Incidentally, that's 50 to 100 times the percentage of professional musicians in relation to the total population of France."{Note 2} Like the attempts of Youtubers who trim their cats and dogs to Pavarotti, François-Bernard Mâche's efforts to play with the musicality of birdsong also fall into the category of technical manipulation. For example, when he arranges a more or less representative selection of bird calls over a harpsichord score.

When you see a dog on YouTube playing the piano without any manipulation, you are amazed, not just amused. Does this dog like the piano or, more precisely, does it think it is a human? Is it a trained dog or one that spontaneously wants to play music? Even without a direct command from his master, his behavior is copied from the musical people he lives with. Videos with animals that seem to love musical situations are extremely popular. The camera angles are therefore chosen in such a way that they seem to confirm the musicality of the animals. But despite all the emotion about a little film showing elephants gathered around a piano on which Paul Barton plays them the Pastoral anyone can ask themselves whether the elephants really love Beethoven or rather the apples lying around the piano. Perhaps it is elephants who, beyond Barton's piano skills, like the exchange between different animal species. If there is anthropomorphism here, if the fixation on humans distorts the interpretation of the situation, then perhaps these open-air concerts prove less the animals' affinity for music than the pianist's empathy for the elephants. Playing Beethoven to someone is a sign of sympathy and is perceived as such. The official stories about these videos with hundreds of thousands of clicks are nourished by a logic of care. These are maltreated animals being rehabilitated in a park in the Thai province of Kanchanaburi. Paul Barton's recitals are a therapy to "rebuild their physical health and their souls".{Note 3} The belief in the beneficial effect of music on the animals is certainly a decisive element in the bond that the pianist is able to forge with the elephants, even without proof that Beethoven or Chopin exerts a visibly healing power on the animals. After all, these concerts are musical performances by a person who detaches himself from other people and would rather play to the pachyderms than to his music-loving fellow human beings.