To clarify: I’m not suggesting animals think all sounds are songs—just that songbirds and humans are the only common animals that combine sounds into arbitrary sequences where each individual sound doesn’t have a single fixed meaning.
To clarify: I’m not suggesting animals think all sounds are songs—just that songbirds and humans are the only common animals that combine sounds into arbitrary sequences where each individual sound doesn’t have a single fixed meaning.
Animals are generally good at understanding that not everyone is them.
A great example is the best animal: The House Cat. Cats are pretty famous for catering their sounds to different targets. Mom not paying attention? Squeaky cry. Something needs to be taught who the big err… cat is? Growl. Content and happy? Purr.
Need something from a human? Meow. Because they understand that humans don’t understand purrs and body language to the same degree.
Animals are good at interpreting other animals’ nonverbal cues, and can often pick up a human’s general intentions without understanding their speech. But the speech itself probably seems like a bad attempt to create an accompanying musical score.
Again, cats aren’t singing. They understand it is just a different (much less efficient and much more danger prone) method of communication.
When cats meow, there’s a one-to-one correspondence between the aural qualities of the sound and the communicative intent of the cat—the same meow doesn’t have different meanings depending on the preceding and following meows. That’s how animals normally use sounds to communicate.
There are two common exceptions, where animals string arbitrary sounds together in longer sequences in which the individual components don’t have distinct communicative intents in the way animals usually interpret them: songbirds and humans. (Another possible exception might be cetaceans.)
(For example: If I said “pass the butter”, “don’t eat all the butter”, or “I need to get more butter”, the word “butter” would have different communicative intents even if I said them the exact same way—like a note of a bird’s song, and unlike a cat’s meow.)
I miss the old world so much. There was a blackbird couple nesting in our apartment building’s courtyard. Every morning it’s a cacophony of the most beautiful and randomly iterated melodies. I loved waking up and snoozing in to it at 5am.
Fixed