Re: Has anyone studied the effects of music on animals?

Dear Kevin:

You asked if anyone has studied the effects of music on animals.  I did a search 
on PsychINFO, which is a database that lists lots of scholarly research, and 
found out a few interesting things.

Peter Peretti and Heidi Kippschull studied the effect of different types of music 
on mice.  They looked at whether the animals exposed to music displayed more of 
the following behaviors: huddling, social interaction, and aggression.  They 
found that all types of music studied (except easy listening) tended to increase 
aggression and social interaction.  Easy listening, on the other hand, increased 
huddling. (Peretti and Kippschull. "Influence of five types of music on social 
behaviors of mice, Mus musculus." Indian Journal of Behaviour 15(2): 51-58, 
1991.)

I also found two articles in the journal Applied Animal Behaviour Science.
The first one, by Hodgetts, Waas and Matthews (1998, vol.55(3-4): 337-351), 
investigated the response of red deer to disturbances, including loud music.  
They found that the deer were more aggressive during the music playing and more 
alert afterward compared to animals that did not hear music.

The second article was by Uetake, Hurnik and Johnson (1997, vol.53(3): 175-182), 
and they looked at the behavior of cows.  They found that cows who listened to 
music were more likely to enter the automatic milking system where they were 
milked.

If you want to do your own research on animal behavior in response to music, you 
should think of a few things:
1) How are you going to record the behavior?  
2) What behaviors are you going to look for in the animal?
3) How long are you going to play the music?
4) What type of music are you going to play?

Remember that you always need a control of animal behavior without any music 
playing, and that you need many observations of animals exposed to the music.  
The number of observations can be done by either exposing many animals at the 
same time to the music (ie expose 4 cats and record their behavior), or exposing 
the same animal many times to the music and see if its behavior changes.  
Ideally, you would like to see if many animals of the same type behave similarly 
when exposed to the music, but this may not be possible for you, if you cannot 
come up with 4 cats to test.

Anyway, I hope this helps.
Happy experimenting!
Ingrid Dodge
Mad Scientist