Re: Musical languistics - Mass Reply

Jan van Steenbergen <ijzeren_jan@...>

>> > Animals respond to music, I'm told.
>
>> They definitely do. In how far this has to do with the emotional load
>>of the music, I don't know.
    IMHO it seems that cats like music a quite bit.
Ferinstanz, recently, Luc the Black Cat - who has adopted me - got rather
pissed-off at me when I turned off a compilation tape of microtonal music then
relaxed when I turned it back on again.
    A friend of mine had a cat that liked crawling into bass guitar amps and
keyboard amps but only if the music was not too "rock-ish" or too loud. This
cat also reaaally seemed to like bass frequencies, especially droning tones.
    I know of a harpist, an acoustic guitarist and a cellist who also are
adopted by cats and these cats are inordinately fond of these musical
instruments' sounds/timbres (BTW these cats were not exactly kittens when they choose
their humans either).
    On the other hand, a sax/bagpipeplayer and an
accordionist/harmonica-player report their cat-companions scramble as far from these particular sounds as
felinely possible (I don't exactly blame 'em either).

---
Hanuman Zhang, the "Yves Klein Bleu Aardvark,"
musical mad scientist (no, I don't wanna take over the world, just the sound
spectrum...)

"We cannot doubt that animals both love and practice music. That is evident.
But it seems their musical system differs from ours. It is another school...We
are not familiar with their didactic works. Perhaps they don't have any."  -
Erik Satie

"Among the artistic hierarchy, the birds are probably the greatest musicians
to inhabit our planet." - Olivier Messiaen

NADA BRAHMA - Sanskrit, "sound [is the] Godhead"
LILA - Sanskrit, "divine play/sport/whimsy" - "the universe is what happens
when God wants to play" - "joyous exercise of spontaneity involved in the art
of creation"

improvisation is "a process of liberation, a working around the assumptions
that define our civilization, and the results are open-ended." - John Berndt