As humans, we don’t know all that much about animals’ hearing or the sounds they make. We consider both, if at all, by our own standards and in the form of comparisons, which may be useful, or not.

Let us take so-called “dancing bears”, to which for centuries spectators attributed something like musicality. Yet to train bears to dance to the lyre, bagpipes or shawm at a fair or circus, the usual method is to torture them – the music is secondary. They are forced to walk over hot iron, or subjected to onslaughts of hot coals. If the bear hears “its” melody, it automatically raises its front paws up in the air and starts to move away from the sources of potential pain. From our perspective, it looks as though it is dancing to the music.

We are revealed not only by the way we think animals perceive our sounds, but also by what we interpret into theirs. Thus only recently a judge in northern Germany ruled that bleating sheep and neighing horses were part of the “natural soundscape”, while a squawking cockatoo was “noise pollution”. We call Mozart’s Missa Brevis in C major the Sparrow Mass owing to its almost fluttering violins. And indeed, the composer loved fowl, even though he probably had no idea that parakeets, for instance, have absolute pitch. Mozart’s biographers, proud of their detailed knowledge, note that on May 27, 1784, he bought a bird for 34 kreuzers. And only a few decades previously, the poet and early Enlightenment philosopher Barthold Heinrich Brockes heard in the nightingale’s song decisive proof of the existence of God.