Clarifying the differences between what animals and humans hear

In researching the biological origins of human musicality, the absence of this neural network in songbirds makes the question of whether humans share relative pitch with other animal species all the more fascinating. Only when little information remains, as with the stimuli in Hulse’s European starling experiment (the stimuli consisted of pure tones, tones without any spectral information), do songbirds pay any attention to pitch. In that case, musicality could be interpreted as a sensitivity that humans share with many nonhuman species, but in humans this predisposition has evolved into two partially overlapping cognitive systems: music and language.

Source: nautil.us