A horse leaves the stable and trots out into the yard. A sound makes him stop. He stands still for a few seconds, then turns his head, looking for the origin of that sound, a melody. He backs up and goes towards the man who is producing it while playing Ravel’s Bolero with a bassoon. The horse stares at him quietly – behind him, three horses are also looking, in their stables -. The horse moves one ear and moves the other. The musician finishes playing, and the horse leaves.
Two women play jazz with a saxophone and a keyboard inside an aviary. The parakeets –the yellow couple, the others with colorful plumage– accompany them singing.
In front of the guitar that sounds in the hands of the musician who playing it right at the door of the stable, another horse sticks his head out, and serene, listens and smells.
The cockatoo, on the other hand, spreads its wings and crest to the maximum; ruffles all its feathers when it hears the saxophone played so close to it by a woman.
The meerkat seeks to get into the saxophone’s biggest hole, wants to dig the bassoon and to climb up the cello. The sound of the guitar soothes him instead.
The strings and the wind instruments attract the donkeys, as much as the piece “London Brigde is falling down”, and jazz in general. They surround the musicians, stare and smell just inches away.
Sheep and rams, as well as cows are the most numerous audiences for these recitals. The first ones bleat and move their bells as soon as they hear the first notes of “When the Saints Go Marching In” on the saxophone. They group together and get closer as the piece progresses. The cows are 50 (some of them with their calves) and are white; they have a similar reaction to the sheeps but they moo even more as they continue to graze.
This is music for animals only. The group, a quartet, is called Animal Band.
The band is from Madrid and so far they have played in the capital and on the outskirts of the city, the countryside of the autonomous community, in farms and animal sanctuaries.
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They started in summer this year, although the idea had already been around for two years among musician friends, Javi Clarke says to IQ Latino. “But we never found room or energy to do it. This summer we agreed that we had a lot of time and energy to plan the idea, and for the love of it, we jumped at the chance to experiment,” he says. Clarke coordinates the quartet’s recital schedules and directs the band.
The quartet is not fixed: the members rotate, because it is a voluntary project; the musicians give away their free time. “We are an open collective of musicians,” Clarke says. ”
Animal Band is the first band in Spain to dedicate its music exclusively to animals.
For the time being, they do one concert every month, one full day in three or four places with different animals, Javi Clarke explains.
Clarke told Cadena Ser’s Myriam Soto that with this experiment they wanted to know “if there are animals who like percussion and rhythm more or, on the contrary, react more to classical music”.
Now that the experiment is progressing and they have played for donkeys, cows, sheeps, goats, meerkats, cockatoos, bulls, ducks “and other more exotic animals that we have not yet published”, they have noticed that the reactions can be unique.
“Mammals seem to have some affinity for stringed instruments such as the piano or guitar, while birds respond to wind sounds such as the saxophone. But assuming this would be too general; each animal is a world, and even within the same species, each individual reacts in a different way. They have their own personalities, their own tastes, and just as we have had donkeys and horses that were very attracted to the sounds and licked the instrument, others have preferred to avoid us. Everyone has their own reaction,” Clarke told IQ Latino.
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Several scientists have studied the reaction of animals to music. In a report for La Vanguardia, Lorena Farrás mentions one research in Japan, published by Science Direct, in which goldfishes were able to distinguish between Johann Sebastian Bach’s “Toccata and Fugue” and Igor Stranvinsky’s “The Rite of Spring.” “Half of the fish were trained to bite a cord with food when Bach sounded and the other half when Stravinsky sounded. And they succeeded!” Farrás wrote.
Researchers from the University of Leicester experimented with dairy cows in England, during twelve weeks, nine hours a day. The researchers exposed the cows to fast and slow music, and to silence. They found that pieces like “Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony” and Simon & Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Waters” produced 3% more milk.
Charles Snowdon, an American psychologist specializing in animal behavior, told National Geographic that the best way to observe the effect of music on animals is to create a species-specific music.
Animal Band says precisely this in its nine-point manifesto: “We know that the frequencies and sound patterns of each species are different, so we are committed to empathizing with each species to suit their needs.”
The manifesto also says in point five: “The similarities between human and animal sounds and the innate desire to create music have led us to explore, with an open heart, the evolutionary field of biomusicology. And in its point seven they state: “We do not want to be ethnocentric and we start from the idea that we do not know the way animals feel. That is why, with infinite respect and love for them and for music, we have joined notes and energy together to try to get closer, with the only intention of making their lives more pleasant”.
At the end of November, Animal Band played on a special urban gig for 30 adopted dogs in the city of Madrid. The outlet Cultura Inquieta found out about the band when they came out – through social media, which is where they make their concerts public – and so they organized the event.
“Great connection of music and audience, and no one bit anyone,” Clarke reviews the concert for the dogs in the interview with IQ Latino. “The truth is that some adopted dogs almost seem to be apologizing to you, they are curious but shy, and with the music and the company of other dogs their fears are relaxed.”
Animal Band is still an experiment in progress. Its musicians do not know about their next steps yet. “We let ourselves be,” Clarke says.
The project needs resources. The director hopes to tour “Concerts for Happily Adopted Dogs in 2020” – there’s already a festival interested, he says – because this is an “optimistic, beautiful and luminous way of trying to seduce and convince” people to adopt.