Aesthetic responses to birdsong: Similarities with human music

The widespread enjoyment of birdsong by human listeners and the frequent incorporation of birdsong into human music compositions suggest that birdsong may be regarded as a form of music. The research reported here approaches this issue by comparing human aesthetic emotional responses to a sample of birdsongs with those to a sample of human music excerpts. The Aesthetic Emotions Scale was used to measure responses to 13 birdsongs and 13 short human music excerpts in two separate samples of about 30 high school and college participants. Data analysis was focused on emotional responses that predicted the feeling of beauty, comparing these predictors for birdsong and human music. The results showed numerous similarities in the predictors for the two sets of stimuli. Prototypical aesthetic emotions such as enchantment and being moved and pleasing emotions such as relaxation and joy emerged as strong positive predictors of the feeling of beauty in both samples, while negative emotions such as confusion and ugliness were strongly negatively correlated with the feeling of beauty in both birdsong and human music. Relationships for epistemic emotions were less consistent except for negative correlations with surprise in both data sets. The clearest difference in the relationship to the feeling of beauty was in sadness, which had a moderately strong positive correlation with the feeling of beauty in human music but a weak negative correlation for birdsong. Thus, birdsong and human music generate highly similar experiences of beauty, suggesting that humans find birdsong to be musical.