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Stewart Hulse and his colleagues at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore have staged a number of tests with starlings. The researchers want not so much to study musical appreciation as to understand how birds perceive musical structures, such as tunes and rhythms. Hulse says that starlings can distinguish between different rhythms and between simple four or five note melodies. They can also discriminate between chords that human listeners find harmonious or discordant. In other laboratories, monkeys and rats have proved equal to the task of telling the difference between two simple tunes.
Preferential ear
Researchers have used complex music in relatively few experiments. In one test staged more than two decades ago by psychologist Robert Zajonc, rats heard music by either Mozart or Schoenberg. Later on they preferred the one they had grown used to - a bit like human concert goers.
Debra Porter and Allen Neuringer of Reed College, Oregon, have found pigeons to be equally, if not more, perceptive. In one test, the birds learned to tell the difference between snatches of flute music by J. S. Bach and viola music by Paul Hindemith. In a second test, another group of birds learnt to peck one target when they heard Bach organ music (one excerpt came from the well-known Toccata and Fugue in D minor) and a second target when they heard Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring.
The experiment then entered its most fascinating phase. The researchers wanted to know if the birds could generalise, so they played them other examples of baroque and modern music. Sure enough, the pigeons pecked the "Stravinsky" target when they heard Stravinsky's The Firebird and the "Bach" one when they heard organ music by the 17th century Danish composer Dietrich Buxtehude.
Pecking order
This seemed pretty perceptive, but it could have been because the birds were pecking one target for organ music and the other for orchestral music. But not so. When the team played the birds some modern organ music, by Walter Piston, the birds pecked the "Stravinsky" target. And a Scarlatti harpsichord sonata sent them to the "Bach" target. However, the birds did put a Vivaldi violin concerto in the modern category, proving they are not as expert as all that. Despite that lapse, the researchers say that the pigeon's response to "complex auditory events" may be more like ours than we think.
With this in mind, perhaps we should not be too surprised when birds pick up and repeat musical phrases and tunes. Bullfinches, canaries, linnets and the like - and parrots - are the real virtuosos here. John Davies described how in just a few weeks Beaky the parrot learnt a complex riff from Miles Davis's Freedom Jazz Dance. Once he had got the riff off pat, the parrot sang it over and over again. What puzzles Davies is why one snatch of music, among so many candidates, should be seized on with such evident enthusiasm. There is no suggestion that the music meant anything to Beaky, but maybe some musical phrases are just easier to learn or sing than others.
Beaky is part of a long and distinguished avian musical tradition. Mozart had a pet starling that could nearly perform the theme from the rondo of his G major piano concerto (K453). Darwin himself knew of a bullfinch that could sing a waltz so beautifully that it fetched 10 guineas when it changed hands. In 1903, the musician Sir George Henschel described a remarkable double act of a bullfinch and a canary. The bullfinch would sing the first half of God Save the King, but then it tended to pause - at which point the canary would leap in and finish the recital.

From issue 1957 of New Scientist magazine, 24 December 1994, page 44
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