Amazon Songbird Shares Human's Taste In Music
There are about 4,000 species of songbird on Earth, each belting out their own unique compositions like little feathered maestros. But among this multitude of warblers and twitterers, one species in particular stands out for having a taste in music that humans can relate to.
Musician wrens, a bird native to Amazon Rainforest, have long been a subject of fascination and fable thanks to their distinctive call, though new research is only now shedding light as to why.
Biologist Henrik Brumm and musicologist Emily Doolittle recently released a study examining what makes the wren's song so pleasing to our ears. What they found is that these songs, uniquely, share many of the same characteristics perceived as "fitting well" in Western Music theory:
The Musician Wren favors consonant over dissonant intervals, something that has rarely been observed in other animal species before. This bird's musicality goes even further: it prefers to sing perfect consonances (octaves, perfect fifths, and perfect fourths) over imperfect consonances leading to some passages which may sound to human listeners as if they are structured around a tonal center.