ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of the music-like behaviors associated with sound perception and production in non-human animals, with an emphasis on cross-species comparisons. It reviews of animal responses to music, focusing on pitch and rhythm perception, before examining animal song and outlining its commonalities with human music. The comparative study of music perception and cognition across animal species, sometimes termed "zoomusicology" or "biomusicology," is a relatively young field of research. Although the empirical study of sound and music perception in animals is a recent phenomenon, scholars have speculated about the potential effects of music on animals for centuries. Relative pitch is a central property of "human" musicality, in that it is associated with the capacity to encode a melody as a set of intervallic relationships, which remains perceptually invariant when transposed to a different pitch. Many animal songs are highly structured, some in ways that overlap with human musical forms.
