Sound has energy. And when you work with animals on any level you realize that energy sends a profound message.

I study animal behavior and help humans understand their animals better. It is my theory that to thoroughly understand animals, you must have knowledge of their behavior as well as tune into them intuitively or telepathically. I have worked with many domestic and wild animals and will share with you how sound has affected animals in the following two cases.

Horses:

I am a certified hypnotist and work with humans to help “center” them so that their animals can benefit from their state of calm and so that they can “hear” their animals better. I was working with a brood mare (a female horse used just for breeding) that had not been handled by people. Centering myself first, my next step was to telepathically send her images of calm, treats, and no harm intended and what my intention was…to get close to touch her.  My third step was to help her identify the images with sound, which intensifies the bond of communication, and gives it more “energy”. Thoughts become things. I started talking to her in my hypnotic voice as though she was a human and realized that she was becoming mesmerized, relaxed and responding to the tone and pitch of my voice.  I had to ad lib a little when it came to her “relaxing her toes, which became relaxing her hooves”.  I observed each body part of hers relaxing as I was going through the mental images, and talking in a melodic tone. Within 20 minutes her head was hanging low, her leg was cocked, and she was very clearly “going under”.  Finally, success, I was able to stroke her neck.

Wolves:

I tried this approach with a wolf-dog (Part wolf and part dog) and with a pack of wolf pups. This time I took it one step further and rather than speaking in English began to chant a Lakota phrase “mitakuye oyasin” which interprets as “we are all related”.  I made up my own tune. The female wolf dog slowed down her frantic pacing in her pen and began to make eye contact with me. When I tried this approach with the wolf pups, they came out of their hiding den slowly, one by one, remained at a distance but were willing to stay in an open area. Progress for both and again responding to a calm tone and pitch of my voice.

Leeds says, “When our auditory process is under or overwhelmed, or when we have difficulty processing sound properly, there can be multiple and far-reaching ramifications.”

Since studies have shown that music affects dogs and humans in much the same way, this suggests that dogs can also suffer stress from over stimulation in busy cities, hectic households, shelters and boarding kennels and perhaps react in negative ways such as house training accidents, barking too much, chewing, biting tendencies, and other behavior issues.

Soothing Music for Dogs

A research program conducted by Dr. Deborah Wells in 2002, studied the effects of five types of auditory stimulation on shelter dogs. They were human conversation, classical music, heavy metal music, pop music, and silence. This study revealed that heavy metal music caused the dogs to stand and bark more and that classical music caused them to rest more.

The BioAcoustic Research & Development project took her research a step further and studied the effects of different types of classical music on more than 150 dogs. Several of the dogs suffered various anxieties from sources such as thunderstorms, separation, children, and other pets. Reportedly, simple arrangements with a solo instrument and a slower tempo had the most soothing effect with 70% of anxiety behaviors reduced.

According to an msnbc.msn.com article, Alianna Boone played harp music for hospitalized dogs in Florida in 2000 and discovered that her tender strains lowered heart and respiration rates in many cases.

Sources:

Through a Dog's Ear Research

What Music Do Pets Prefer?

You might want to think twice before leaving on that classical music for your pet when you leave the house.

• Animals like species-specific music that is designed using the pitches, tones and tempos that are familiar to them.
• To animals, human music falls into a grating, unrecognizable category.
• Leaving on classical music or soothing music for your pets might not be best for them.

  Many pet owners leave their home radios playing all day for the listening pleasure of their dogs and cats. Station choices vary. "We have a very human tendency to project onto our pets and assume that they will like what we like," said Charles Snowdon, an authority on the musical preferences of animals. "People assume that if they like Mozart, their dog will like Mozart. If they like rock music, they say their dog prefers rock."

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  Against the conventional wisdom that music is a uniquely human phenomenon, ongoing research shows that animals actually do have the capacity for music. But rather than liking classical or rock, Snowdon, an animal psychologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has discovered that animals march to the beat of a different drum altogether. They enjoy what he calls "species-specific music": tunes specially designed using the pitches, tones and tempos that are familiar to their particular species.

  With no pun intended, music is all about scale: Humans like music that falls within our acoustic and vocal range, uses tones we understand, and progresses at a tempo similar to that of our heartbeats. A tune pitched too high or low sounds grating or ungraspable, and music too fast or slow is unrecognizable as such.

To animals, human music falls into that grating, unrecognizable category. With vocal ranges and heart rates very different from ours, they simply aren't wired to enjoy songs that are tailored for our ears. Studies show that animals generally respond to human music with a total lack of interest. With this general rule in mind, Snowdon has worked with cellist and composer David Teie to compose music that is tailored to suit them.

Back in 2009, the researchers composed two songs for tamarins — monkeys with vocalizations three octaves higher than our own and heart rates twice as fast. The songs sound shrill and unpleasant to us, but they seem to be music to the monkeys' ears. The song modeled on excited monkey tones and a fast tempo made the tamarins visibly agitated and active. By contrast, they calmed down and became unusually social in response to a "tamarin ballad," which incorporated happy monkey tones and a slower tempo.

Snowdon and Teie have moved on to composing music for cats, and studying how they respond to it.

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"We have some work-in-progress where we've transposed music and put it in the frequency range for cat vocalizations, and have used their resting heart rate, which is faster than ours," he told Life's Little Mysteries. "We find that cats prefer to listen to the music composed in their frequency range and tempo rather than human music."

On the basis of their results, Teie has started selling cat songs online (at $1.99 per song) through a company called "Music for Cats."

Dogs are tougher nuts to crack, mostly because breeds vary widely in size, vocal range and heart rate. However, large dogs such as Labradors or mastiffs have vocal ranges that are quite similar to those of adult male humans. "So, it is possible that they might be responsive to music in our frequency range. My prediction is that a big dog might be more responsive to human music than a smaller dog such as a Chihuahua," Snowdon said. [Dogs Play the Piano in New Video]

Indeed, some dogs do appear to respond emotionally to human music. Research led by Deborah Wells, a psychologist at Queen's University Belfast, shows that dogs can discern between human music of different genres. "Our own research has shown that dogs certainly behave differently in response to different types of music, e.g., showing behaviors more suggestive of relaxation in response to classical music and behaviors more suggestive of agitation in response to heavy metal music," Wells wrote in an email.

Considering the great demand for new ways to please our pets, more progress is likely to be made in the field of animal music. But no matter how well composers perfect their dog, cat and monkey songs, the animals will probably never appreciate their species-specific music quite as much as humans appreciate ours. According to Snowdon, they lack an important musical ability that we possess: relative pitch.

"We can recognize that a sequence of notes is the same whether it's in the key of F or A flat," he said. "I have found that animals have very good absolute pitch, but they don't have relative pitch. They can learn to recognize a sequence of notes, but if you transpose the notes to a different key, so that the sequence uses the same relative notes but the key is different, they can't recognize the relationships between the notes anymore."

He added, "To that extent, we understand music in a different way than animals do."

http://news.discovery.com/animals/animals-music-120320.html