S4E5: Animal Music with Martin Ullrich

In this episode Claudia talks to musicologist Martin Ullrich about animals and music. Together they touch on the multiple ways in which music and animals intersect from how animals inspire human music, to how animals make and listen to music, and the ethics of more-than-human musical encounters. They find that the focus on animals and music destabilizes anthropocentric understandings of both culture and aesthetics.

Date Recorded: 15 December 2021

Martin Ullrich studied piano in Frankfurt and Berlin as well as music theory in Berlin too. He received his PhD in musicology in 2005. His main research area is sound and music in the context of more-than-human aesthetics (nonhuman animals and music, artificial intelligence and music), with an emphasis on human-animal studies. He has presented and chaired at international conferences and has published on animal music and the relationship between animal sounds and human music. Martin was a professor for music theory at Berlin University of the Arts from 2005 to 2009 and the president of Nuremberg University of Music from 2009 to 2017. Since 2017, he has worked as a professor for interdisciplinary musicology and human-animal studies at Nuremberg University of Music. Find Martin on Facebook and Twitter (@MResearchHAS).  

Featured: 

Human-Elephant Encounters in Music by Martin Ullrich; Animal Music: David Rothenberg, Dario Martinelli, and Martin Ullrich Exchange Their Views on the Topic Minding Animals: Studies and Research Contributions  by Jessica Ullrich;  The Critical Posthumanities; Or, Is Medianatures to Naturecultures as Zoe Is to Bios?  by Rosi Braidotti;

A.P.P.L.E
Animals in Politics, Law, and Ethics researches how we live in interspecies societies and polities.

Sonic Arts of Place Laboratory (SAPLab)
The SAP Lab provides workspace and equipment for students engaged in sound related activities.

Sonic Arts Studio
The Queen’s Sonic Arts Studio (formerly Electroacoustic Music Studio) was founded in 1970.

iROAR Network
iROAR brings together podcasts that aim is to make the world a better place for animals.

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:01

This is another IRO podcast.

SPEAKER_01: 0:04

This emotive impact of music, I think uh we should use it for the good cause and not pretend that aesthetics is just an autonomous realm which has nothing to do with ethics or politics. It's all entangled in the Anthropocene, and we we we do good to acknowledge that.

SPEAKER_03: 0:41

In today's episode, we're going to be speaking all about music, which is really exciting. And my guest today, Martin Ulrich, is both a musician and very well versed in music theory and music theory related to animals. So could you ask for a more perfect guest? But before I introduce him and let you know more about him and his background, I forgot to mention something last week. Uh, in between kind of telling you all about the sound difficulties and blah blah blah, uh, I forgot to mention that myself and the podcast were awarded something. Yay! Yes, we were given the inaugural award for the Acer Acer Award for Popular Communication. So that's the Australasian Animal Studies Association Award for Popular Communication, which was crafted and put together by Stevana Sullivan, who's also a podcaster, and she launched uh Knowing Animals. And how amazing is that! Uh, you know, animal studies and getting to know animals and kind of the ways that we talk about in this podcast is often made possible by the funding that other animal studies scholars kind of put forward. And Siobhan has been quite prolific in terms of setting up uh structures and opportunities for animal study scholars. So not only did she launch the Knowing Animals podcast, but she's a key member in the creation and kind of the continued structuring of uh ACE, the Australasian Animal Studies Association. And now she's also launched these uh awards, one for popular communication and another for a paper. And these are going to be annual awards, so make sure you check them out for next year as well. But I cannot tell you how meaningful and important it is to me that uh the Animal Tone has won something here. This is probably some of the most significant work I do, and uh it matters to me a great deal, and I hope it matters to you a great deal and that you find it useful and important. And and I think the Animal Tone is going to be here for a while. So fingers crossed, yay! But it meant so much for getting an award from people who I know care a lot about animals and think through the ethics of knowing animals and how we interact with animals. And uh yeah, so this was really a big achievement. And uh thank you so much to ASA for the recognition and the award. And as part of that, I also ended up being uh I was also a guest on Knowing Animals uh that came out earlier this month with Josh Milburn, who's now taken over the microphone from Shavano Sullivan. And uh, we spoke about a paper I recently wrote on milking economies with Carolyn Prouse, uh, where we spoke a bit about kind of the entanglements of cows, goats, and humans in an infant formula factory in Canada, which is also like a foreign direct investment with China. Lots of moving parts in the paper, and uh, I hope it came through in the conversation with Josh. Uh, and we also spent a little bit of time in that episode talking about podcasting and kind of how animal studies allows itself for interdisciplinary thought. Uh, that's not always easy, but is really uh exciting. So, yay, yay, I can officially say that this is an award-winning podcast, or I'm an award-winning podcaster. I don't I don't know which way it goes, but I'm pretty excited and happy. And I wanted to let you, dear listeners, know because uh really half of the support and half of this award goes to you from sharing, from sending in feedback, from sending in reviews, from making the animal tone known to others. Uh, it's grown and grown. And those sneaky algorithms have a way of knowing. So every time you share, like, or give a review, more people get to get to see it. And um, and then hopefully I can cow up more time to make more content for you in the future. Anyway, I digress. Uh, life is good. 2022 is off to a solidly good start. So thank you, thank you, Asa, and thank you, dear listeners. Uh, but let's get to today's episode. So, in today's episode, I'm gonna be speaking to Martin Ulwich, and he is just so interesting and dynamic and has so many awesome thoughts related to animals and just the various threads uh how of how you can think about music in relation to animals. And you're gonna hear it throughout this episode, he kind of drops ideas of the ways in which you could explore the relationship between music and animals. So, if this is something that interests you, there are numerous avenues for you to kind of continue this thought and following these ideas. So, Martin Ulrich studied piano in Frankfurt and Berlin as well as music theory in Berlin. He received his PhD in musicology in 2005. His main research area is sound and music in the context of the more than human aesthetics. So this includes non-human animals and music, but also artificial intelligence and music, which is really fascinating. He does have an emphasis on human animal studies, however, and uh he's got a really sophisticated knowledge in these areas. He has presented and chaired at international conferences and has published on animal music and the relationship between animal sounds and human music. He was a professor for music theory at Berlin University of Arts from 2005 to 2009 and the president of the Nuremberg University of Music from 2009 to 2017. Since 2017, he has worked as a professor for interdisciplinary musicology and human animal studies at Nuremberg University of Music. It's a wonder to have him on the show today, and this really blends nicely from our focus on methods. So we've spoken a lot about different methods, bioacoustics, um, you know, archives, uh, soundwalking, sonic methods. And now I think we're starting to move more into the theoretical realms and thinking about really some of these deep concepts and how we work and think through them. And music is an awesome place to start there. So uh happy listening. Hi Martin, welcome to the Animal Tone Podcast.

SPEAKER_01: 6:30

Hi Claudia, wonderful to be here.

SPEAKER_03: 6:33

We were just chatting in the green room. You are in Germany, and I'm in Vancouver, and you said that you are in Bavaria, right?

SPEAKER_01: 6:42

Yeah, I'm in Nuremberg, which is in Bavaria, um, and in a uh a dull uh winter season in Bavaria, yeah.

SPEAKER_03: 6:51

Oh, but but winter in Europe is so beautiful. You've got all the lights, especially, especially at this time of year. All your cities are really beautiful with lights and marketplaces. And I've never been to Bavaria, but hopefully, hopefully one day I'll get a chance to go and visit.

SPEAKER_01: 7:08

Yeah, but but Vancouver is a beautiful city too, isn't it?

SPEAKER_03: 7:11

Oh yeah, it really is beautiful. Lots of big forests. It's also quite quite grey, actually, quite grey and very rainy, which is a winter I'm not used to at all from normally being on the east side of the country. So yeah, it's the world is beautiful, I think.

SPEAKER_02: 7:27

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_03: 7:28

Uh so thank you so much for joining me today. Uh, we're going to be speaking about a I think a really fascinating concept and so which is music. And I've got to admit that I don't know a lot about music at all, to be honest. My my sense of music comes down to, oh, I like it. That's that's really where it goes to. So I I tend to not remember the names of bands, I tend to not remember the names of songs. I'm the person that goes, you know, that annoying person that listens to the radio and just kind of makes up their own words. That's that's me. I'm that person. But music seems to be such an important part of life somehow. So I'm really excited to be speaking to you about animals and music today. Uh, but before we get into that, perhaps you could tell us a little bit about you and some of the work you do and how you came to be interested in animals and music.

SPEAKER_01: 8:25

Um yeah, sure. Um actually I started out um with a very traditional approach to music. Um, I was raised in a family uh which was keen on what we call classical music, so European art music in musicological speech. And um I learned piano from early on, and I studied piano and set out to be a pianist, and um then my interest in music theory and music research in general grew and grew, and I also became more interested in the margins of the field, you could say. So uh there is this very traditional, maybe orthodox idea of music as uh something very, very human, very cultural, um, following rules, bound into human culture, and then there are the margins when you get into music by computers, music by maybe artificial intelligences, and music by animals, which obviously is our um main theme today. And um yeah, I think um actually my my colleagues like 15 or 16 years ago when I started to do research not only on the works of uh Ludwig van Beethoven and Robert Schumann, but also on bird song. Um maybe they thought I I um yeah um aired in the wrong direction. And and I have to admit, up to now there are not too many music researchers who seriously engage with non-human musics. Uh so it's it's uh a growing field, but it's still um you could say a niche in in the mainstream of Western musicology.

SPEAKER_03: 10:15

I think based on what I've seen so far with sound, it tends to be even the previous episodes so far, we've tended to focus on like bioacoustics and ethology and people thinking about sound, but not necessarily music, which is uh which there there is something different going on there, right?

SPEAKER_01: 10:33

Yeah, I I mean uh your approach to music, as you described it, uh um just um listening to things, liking things, I think that's basically a good approach, but but the approach in academic musicology is you could say um uh a very the term music is so loaded with cultural history, with uh concepts of rule-based composition, of a division between active musicians and passive listeners, performers who perform something which a composer has uh pre-produced. Um there are so many concepts that it's um sometimes not so easy to apply this to something like bird song or or bioacoustical sounds. So you could say the the concept of music is much more differentiated and problematic than the concept of sound. And and um this becomes uh more easy if you have a very you could say contemporary or avant-garde uh approach to music. So there is this famous quote which some people attribute to the to the uh composer John Cage, other to Edgar Varese, uh European composer, uh, that music is just organized sound. And if you apply such a broad and wide concept, it becomes easier to include animal music in the picture as well. But if you stick to the traditional idea and definition of music, conflicts can arise because there are so many concepts and and so many layers which are included if you say music, which goes much beyond the concept or idea of sound.

SPEAKER_03: 12:14

Yeah, that's so that's so true. Because I was even thinking in in preparation for this this episode, and I realize now I just completely sidetracked your backstory. We will get back to your interest in in how you became here. Obviously, it's a very interesting idea, music. Um because in in preparing for this episode, I actually I didn't even know where to start to read about animals and music. And then you start to look it up, and all you kind of you get a lot of YouTube videos of people playing music to to animals, which is is fascinating. But in the in the scholarly sense, I found it quite actually hard to find these things. And then I started to think, okay, well, how would I define music? What are big and you almost lend yourself to other concepts, right? What other concepts are there? So I started to think, okay, well, there's rhythm, there's song, there's uh beat, there's harmony, there's listening, there's dancing. So there are all these things. So music does seem really loaded, but it also seems really difficult to define. It doesn't it it's like one, any of those words, they seem like everybody knows what it is, but really the second you try to define it, it seems impossible.

SPEAKER_01: 13:22

With a little bit of irony, one could say that um uh scholars uh once thought they could define music, and now all agree that there is no universal definition of music. Uh, state of the art in in academic musicological research um is uh that there is no single definition of music which really uh covers all you know cultures, approaches, and aspects of music. And and um we actually in the last years we have started to put it in the plural and say musics instead of music, which I think is a good thing, uh just to show that um there is um not one single concept of music, um, and to show that the hidden normative aspects when we say music, and often mean European music or Western art music or something like that, um, can be dismantled if we just all agree uh that there are music and that there are many, you could say, worlds or many umwelten uh in which musics can happen and musics can realize themselves. And I think when we speak about the music of non-human animals, it's quite worthwhile to to use this plural uh approach as well.

SPEAKER_03: 14:41

Yeah, I I like that you mentioned um Umwelt Day because yeah, music is an experience, right? It's something yeah, it's something that you experience. It's it's it's you move to, you feel it. It's not just it's not just something that's created, it's something that's felt almost, which is very different to to kind of the maybe the clinical definition of you know, you need this beat or you need this rhythm, um, which is a different way of thinking about music. Before we dive, because I think we're getting really far into to music now, and it's fascinating, and obviously we're going to speak about this for the next hour. Uh, but before we get too deep into that, perhaps we could talk a little bit about uh you more, because I kind of cut you off there when I got super excited about the idea of music. What is your backstory? How did you come to be interested in music? And and because you're a musician, right? This is something we haven't even spoken about. And and why bird song? Why did bird song appeal to you?

SPEAKER_01: 15:44

Birdsong appealed to me from early on, and and I was keen on animals early on. And um, when I look back, uh, there have been some moments uh in my uh in my childhood and my early experiences with music uh which were connected with animals. I can give you one example. I practiced the piano, and uh actually my parents they live in a small town in a rural area of Germany, and um there always were some cows um out there just bordering to their garden. And when I practiced the piano and the window was open, sooner or later all the cows would standing in line uh next next to my parents' garden and listen to the music. So looking back, I have to say, um I experienced that there was a connection between uh animals and music, but um all this got systematized for me much later when when I had studied piano, when I had studied music theory, when I had worked on my PhD in musicology, and when I had gone through all these, you know, um really classical repertoires, playing Bach, playing Chopin, playing uh Beethoven uh and Brahms, and and um um at one point um I was interested to you know um go further, and and I have to admit, I am very lucky uh to be uh married to one of the pioneers of human animal studies in Germany, um uh Jessica Ulrich, um, my wife, who's an art historian, and uh she started to do research on uh animals uh and fine arts um at a very early point when nearly no one in Germany was interested in animal studies at all. And there was this moment when she told me, I think it was in 2005, hey, there's the first uh animals and history conference in Germany. Um it was scheduled in Cologne, and she was like, Isn't there anything about animals and music? And I was like, um actually there's a lot, and then it all started for me that I I recognized that human music is so full of animals, so full of animal sounds, human music of so many uh um uh times and and uh regions. Um, and and then the next step was to realize there is there are those uh many sources, many compositions, many pieces, um, many human practices which are connected, animals in music, and there is so scarce research on that. There are only a very few people who really research that, and and uh this came together for me, and and I started to do it. And now here I am in Nuremberg, being a professor for interdisciplinary music research and human animal studies, to to give you the short version.

SPEAKER_03: 18:51

Um I think it's really uh fantastic that your your you and your wife kind of have these overlapping interests with with art and history as well as with um music, because this was something that came up a lot in season two, which was the focus on animals and experience. And I spoke to um Jeffrey Bussolini about the idea of art and aesthetics and animals, and this blew my mind. He had some really interesting ideas about how animals produce art, and and this all harkens back to the idea of culture and who has culture. So, when you are thinking about animals and music, is this an expression of culture? Is this animals expressing culture?

SPEAKER_01: 19:33

Yes, I think so. I mean, there is such a lot of very interesting biological research on cultural phenomena in animals, and I think what makes music especially interesting among the arts is that um while when we deal, for example, with um literature and animals, um, it's uh always mediated, it's always literate literature about or on animals. Um while with music, we have this very, very different situation. We have, as you mentioned before, music for animals, when humans play music for non-human animals. We have on on the other hand um uh music by animals, which uh is imitated by by humans. This this is uh has happened very often in the history of of uh Western music and of other music as well. But we have, and uh I think this um is the core of your last question animal music out there uh without any importance uh whether uh there are humans around. So I think yes, songbirds or humpback whales, vocalizing species, they have their own music, they have their own culture, and they have it on their own. So I I sometimes think um this has kind of a political impact as well, because um we have all those interrelations of of cultural relationships between non-human animals and and uh humans uh in music, but we also have those you could say authentic music of non-human animals, and and we in the Anthropocene tend to you know disturb this, and and it's there are interesting analogies to to what happened to to many music of of different uh human populations. Yeah, it's it's just you know, it's globalized, it's universalized, and it's it's it's losing its authenticity, and and I think the same happens nowadays with, for example, bird song or whale song.

SPEAKER_03: 21:43

That's an interesting way to think of it. So I I know that the the Anthropocene kind of human activity and movement and urbanization is disrupting animals in a variety of ways. Uh, I mean we we spoke with with Brian and with Jonathan Pryor earlier in the season about how you know it actually changes the pitch of their songs. It literally alters even the ways in which making music is possible is shifted. But you introduced there, I think, another idea of globalization, which I think is it's fascinating because we do talk about globalization as as you you speak there about like flattening out human culture to some extent, kind of making everything a bit samey. We're different but we're the same. And this is something that comes up, I think, a lot in in urban studies is how, especially in business districts, they all somehow end up being the same, or you go to a hotel, a hotel is a hotel is a hotel kind of thing. But I'd never thought of globalization as also flattening out um animal cultures. And I have no idea what to do with that information. You know, we speak about destruction and and environmental destruction, but perhaps even this globalizing world is is making sameness amongst animals too. And perhaps there's nothing inherently wrong or in that, but it is an interesting thing to unpack and think through. Uh, really, yeah, it's kind of wild.

SPEAKER_01: 23:03

Yeah, and and and and perhaps music is is just a good example for those uh uh strange and wild processes. Uh I mean um there is scientific research on songbirds in urban surroundings picking up uh cell phone sounds, integrating them in yeah, yeah. So they they are not only altering their pitch, as you said, they are altering their loudness, which is by the way, a real uh problem because it costs them much more energy, they consume much more energy to sing just louder because our cities are so noisy. Um, and and they uh imitate uh human sounds, human melodies, human musics. Um and it's it's an ambiguous thing. I don't want to, you know, I don't want to frame it like a totally uh negative thing. Um we all know that that there are some uh animals who you know flourish in urban surroundings and who integrate them uh quite well in these uh human-shaped uh umwelten again, but there is this backside uh to it, and and music might be a very good, you know, um a very sensitive uh means of of catching up with those processes.

SPEAKER_03: 24:23

Yeah, and I think this also speaks to to some of you know Umwelt, but also with regards to culture. You know, the fact that they're changing and picking up things is not just indicative of of animals saying stuff, they're actually changing and and cultures, I think sometimes we have a really static idea of culture, and we apply this to a variety of people as well, where we think, okay, well, this is ex-culture, so it needs to always be like this. But culture is not static. Culture changes based on environment and the situations you find yourself in. So if we start to think of culture in that sense, and different animal societies and populations are being impacted by the world, by globalization, by technologies, or whether it's coming into closer contact with species they've never been in contact with before, or sounds and technologies they haven't. The fact that they're changing their tune, quite literally, means that they're cultural. They're adaptable, their cultures are figuring it out, which is uh really significant and important.

SPEAKER_01: 25:25

Mm-hmm. And as I am uh very interested in post-humanist theory, um maybe uh here's a good point to to hint at Donna Harrow's very, very interesting concept of uh nature cultures, where where in the contact zones uh uh for non-humans and humans, nature and culture like blurs into each other. And I was fascinated to learn that uh Rosie Braidotti um picked that up and even developed it further in what she calls um media natures, or uh, she has even written media nature cultures. So here we have those effects that you you can't say um it's it's it's a good thing or a bad thing, but you have to just realize that non-human animals in their sound production, in their I would say music making, in their musical cultures, are affected by by the technosphere, not only by human culture, but but by this digitalized, uh, as you said, globalized and and uh very technically framed uh culture. And so it's it's not it's not the last um uh Mozart piano concerto or or the last opera area, which um maybe the the the songbirds in Vienna in the 18th century would pick up, but it's the cell phone, uh uh the ringing cell phone or or um the traffic noise uh which they pick up and which they incorporate in their musical uh expressions.

SPEAKER_03: 26:56

It's fascinating. It really is because you so we we've spoken about Umwalt and and and animals being affected. So music impacts animals, but music animals also create music, whether it's the song, and this comes back to some of what you were saying earlier about the idea of you know there being an audience and a performer and what is music. But with this idea of effect, this speaks a little bit to your your paper on uh human-elephant encounters, which I I read yesterday. And it's a lovely, like it's a fairly short piece, but I think you punched, you really say some profound things in in that piece. Um and I went and I watched some of those videos by is it Paul Paul Bart Paul Barton?

SPEAKER_02: 27:35

Paul Barton, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_03: 27:37

Um and I think I had seen them doing the rounds a few years ago, but I hadn't realized that there was this kind of intervention taking place. So so perhaps you could tell us a little bit about these uh human-animal encounters uh with regards to Paul uh Paul Paul Barton's work, but also what you're you're seeing here in these interactions.

SPEAKER_01: 27:57

Yeah, yeah. Um I think Paul Barton is a very interesting and very special case of humans making music uh for animals because uh he's this uh Western-trained pianist who's very aware of the terrible history um uh Western piano making, piano manufacturing has done to elephants and to elephant cultures. Uh we all know that um they've been driven near to extinction um uh because of ivory, and up to just a few decades ago, all keyboards of all pianos were uh made of ivory. So um um lots of dead elephants in uh western living rooms and uh western concert halls. And uh Paul tries to in a way reconvene that uh in a way to to do something good for the few remaining elephants. He goes to Thailand, uh, where the um where the retired retired former working elephants uh live, and he plays piano music for them. And I would say it's at the same time moving and and a bit sad as well, because it's um trying to heal uh like uh a historical guild, but on the other hand, he tries to heal it with you know a very um uh westernized approach because he plays uh the Beethoven sonata uh or the Chopin prelude. Um and uh what happens is, and this is um very remarkable, that some of the elephants just obviously like it, listen to it, feel calmed by it, and and again, if we dig a bit deeper, there's a lot of cultural history going on there. This idea that music can have healing powers, that there is something like music therapy, and that perhaps those healing. Powers and this therapeutical use of music is not restricted to humans but is something we share with non-human animals. So there's a layer of this in Paul Barton's work as well. So it's at the same time fascinating, and and sometimes it has a bit of you know, yeah, a sad aspect as well. Um because quite obviously we can't we can't make up for all the wrongness and all all the cruelty uh humans have have uh done to to elephants.

SPEAKER_03: 30:35

No, and and I think, you know, just to also bring highlights the fact that there is ivory, and ivory comes from an animal. I think sometimes we lose sight that so many of our commodities are composed of animals' bodies, and that is kind of a history of of violence. And a history of performance as well. So I think he's it's an interesting kind of reversal that he's attempting here of performing for the elephants instead of performing for someone else. And um and and like you said, the idea of audience and and connection, because there was that one video, and you spoke about it in the paper too, of the elephant who is blind. And as soon as he plays the piano, the elephant tucks his trunk into his mouth and he sits as though as though Mickey Valley spoke about it with regards to a dog saying um leaning in. There's this idea of leaning into music that you can see there's an attentiveness. There's actually Yeah, and we we all do it. No one taught me to be still when I'm when I'm fascinated by something or when I'm captivated, and there is a uh a captivation happening there.

SPEAKER_01: 31:38

Mm-hmm. I think um there are um uh uh several fascinating thoughts in what you just said, Claudia, and maybe if we have the time we can come back later to this aspect of you know um the materiality of animals in music instruments, because this is a huge area, but but just following up on what you said on this uh leaning in, there are so interesting and I think convincing theories right now about the evolutionary roots of music, uh of uh maybe a deep um evolutionary uh neighboring of music to to language, to verbal language. And I mean the whole concept of of um naturalized or evolutionary aesthetics as philosophy would frame it, hints at the idea that aesthetics and and uh this ability to to lean into music, to lose yourself in music can't just have can cannot only exist in in the human species. Because it's it's so deeply ingrained, it must have a much longer evolutionary history uh than just uh having emerged a few hundred thousand or a few millions ago.

SPEAKER_03: 32:57

Yeah, and and that makes me think of the you know the the dawn chorus, the the fact that you know this is what people speak that there's a function to sound. There's a reason we sound, and there's a reason we sound together, and um and we've just come to kind of use music as a concept to frame some of those sounds and those soundings. Um and uh it's got me actually what got me interested in the idea of of music uh for for this season. I mean, of course music was there, but I wasn't too sure how it related to sound. But then Hannah, who does the animal highlights at the end of each episode, she mentioned a recent study that found that injury lemurs have rhythm, um, and that they're the first mammal to have been identified to have rhythm, so a particular beat to their music, and they they tend to join in and harmonize and stuff. And and I thought this was fascinating. I mean, I was like, wow, this is amazing. But at the same time, I found myself saying, well, wait, hang on, but what is rhythm? And why do they why do they get rhythm? Um I might not be able to sing in tune with someone else, but and someone might see my dancing and be like, oh, she's got no rhythm. But surely there are more animals than injury lemurs, or more mammals at least than injury lemas that have rhythm and music.

SPEAKER_01: 34:11

Mm-hmm. And and um now we we we reach a point where we can, I'm I'm tempted to say beautifully dismantle what Agampen would call the anthropological machine, because the the tradition of music research was for a long time to say there are some musical traits only humans have. For example, this trait of uh rhythm of um entrainment, so getting into the groove, moving, dancing, swaying in in a groove, in a in a rhythmical pulsation, um uh melody, harmony, um on and on and on. And we know these discussions from other fields like um do animals use tools, um uh do and and all those traits were seen as differentiating humans from all other animals. And in the last years, so many research has emerged uh what non-hum human animals in music are capable of. So so many animal species have risen, can entrain. And and you you can just follow uh the research and see okay, there's uh there's an animal um which can entrain uh to a certain rhythm, uh, but it's a vocalizing animal. Okay, it's a good vocalizer, so it's comparable to humans. And then these uh there was this stranded California sea lion, which um Peter Cook and other researchers in the lab in 2015, I think. And those sea lions are very bad vocalizers, they they don't sing at all, yeah. And it entrains beautifully, and it can change the rhythm and the tempo and thing, and so um um I I think um in music, as in other areas, we now have this point where where the old paradigm to say traits are human, uh exclusive to humans, and uh animals just don't have it, and this is what makes us human. Uh, this old paradigm is changed into maybe they have it, and maybe we just haven't discovered it yet.

SPEAKER_03: 36:21

Or maybe we weren't asking the right questions, I guess. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 36:25

Maybe maybe maybe we just didn't listen.

SPEAKER_03: 36:28

So this idea of entrainment, so yes, there's there's singing and there's sounding nice when you sing, and then there's entrainment. And if I understand you correctly, what you're meaning with entrainment is the ability to move to music.

SPEAKER_01: 36:41

Is that is that about being trained to dance or um yeah, often to dance, it's it's the ability to pick up um a certain rhythm or a certain pulse and to react to it, for example, by dancing, swaying, tapping, and so on.

SPEAKER_03: 37:00

Mm-hmm. Okay, and yeah, I mean, obviously, even in those those those videos of of elephants, you can see some of them are swaying and some of them aren't. So some of them are taken, like you said, by the music and and others aren't, which is, I think. And that's something you brought up in the paper as well, is the idea that there's a kind of subjectivity involved in listening to music and kind of deciding that you enjoy the music. Um, could you perhaps tell us a little bit about that? How you think music and subjectivity or the idea of self, I guess, are related.

SPEAKER_01: 37:34

When we talk about music and humans, um, we are so used to the idea that there are different approaches to music, that some people like music, others dislike, and so on. But when it comes to animals and music, we tend to have a very uh generalized idea of the species. And uh we talk about um the generic nightingale or the generic blackbird or the generic whale, and and seem to uh seem to suggest uh that they are all the same. And I mean this is obviously not the case if it comes to um other to other aspects of of animal characters or subjectivity, as you could say, and it's obviously not the case when it comes to music as well. You you said earlier that uh these are cultures. So if we have uh music cultures in animals, we have learning processes, we have processes of intergenerational learning, uh intraspecific learning, and of course, some are more talented than others, some uh have more training, have more experience, have maybe uh better teachers uh and and uh um uh develop uh other abilities. This this actually goes up to regional dialects. So a nightingale or a blackbird in Germany will sing in another dialect, will sing other melodies, other verses than than in France or Spain.

SPEAKER_03: 39:05

Fascinating. Ah, yeah, and and again, I think I think this just goes to show kind of how its significant it is when you decent to the human. I think it makes understanding music much more interesting. It makes thinking about what music is more interesting, but it also gives us, I think, a deeper appreciation for animals, the ways in which they experience the world, the ways in which we disrupt those experiences, and also to just see the beauty of it all. Uh I saw a definition, I was trying to understand music, and the definition of music was vocal or instrumental sounds combined in such a way to produce beauty or harmony or an expression of emotion. And I know that's just the Google definition, um, but I think a lot of what you're saying here is there's beauty in music. And uh like Carl Safina in his um when I spoke to him, he said, no, well, you know, there's a reason most humans like green, and green and blue are the most popular colours because somewhat evolutionary beauty is something deep within us. We've we've got an appreciation for that, and I think we've got an appreciation for sound and and the beauty that sound brings, which is just, yeah, I I love the idea that animals are singing to one another, and I think we appreciate it, like we we kind of take it for granted that birds sing to each other to get a mate, but we've created this sterile understanding of it, like, oh, it's just it's just the power of that word, just it's just a mating call, but it's beautiful. There's dancing routines and songs and music.

SPEAKER_01: 40:31

You're right, and and uh I I as uh as a scholar and as someone uh who comes very uh clearly from a tradition of philological work and of discourse analysis. I am delighted to see that in biology, in evolutionary biology, there's a new appreciation for that, and that there are very interesting attempts in the natural sciences to you could say defunctionalise those aesthetic expressions. Um, there is, for example, the very interesting work of Richard Trumm, who has um highlight uh the Darwin uh concept of uh sexual selection for evolutionary um uh for evolutionary aesthetic phenomena, and who has um, as far as I understand it, uh showed that you can have an evolutionary theory of beauty and of aesthetics which is not bound to a merely functional uh idea. So there there is in in musicology we'd say there there is something autonomous um developing in aesthetics, even if it's an evolutionary aesthetics. So, in in a fascinating way, uh here animals mediate interdisciplinary exchange as well. And and uh musicology and biology uh can find uh new points where they agree and where they uh work together. So I think that's a very worthwhile development, not only when it comes to animals and music, but when it comes to music research uh in general.

SPEAKER_03: 42:14

Yeah, I think it's fascinating. And I think the more we speak to people from across disciplines and the more we I mean, I I listen to podcasts about neutrinos, and I have no idea what I'm really listening to, but the you know, when when you start to listen to and try and appreciate uh stuff that's really far out for you, I think uh it it bends your brain in a new way. And I think the more people are bending their brains, the more we'll be able to, I think, really appreciate animals. And I and hopefully that appreciation will lead to kinder interactions. You know, earlier on in the episode, you mentioned that you played music for cows as a kid and you found that they came. And just yesterday I I watched a video of a trombonist playing, and you kind of all of a sudden you see a cow pop on the horizon, and one cow comes. There's always seems to be one cow that's like, hey, wait, something's going on, and then all the cows come, and there's this beautiful time-lapse of these cows just coming and gathering to listen to the trombonist, and it's just I mean, I've I've I I I love cows, I'm doing my PhD on cows, but just the idea that you know they're these animals that we take so for granted, and they love the trombone. There they are listening to music and and loving it. Uh it's just beautiful. Um, what do you think of this kind of sensation of people online playing music for animals?

SPEAKER_01: 43:36

Um I mean that's that's a that's a very wide area, and I I I find it difficult to to uh put it uh uh just into one word. You know, there there's a cultural history of this. Um I I obviously I didn't know that when I was playing piano as a child for the cows, but um there are uh herding practices uh where cows are just where where shepherds communicate with cows uh by making music, singing, playing instrumental music. So there is really a cultural tradition in this, and um all the stuff you find on the internet, I think it's a broad range from total nonsense and maybe even um uh not so not so nice experiences for uh for animals, uh up to interspecies creativity, you could say. And and I mean what what what makes it uh challenging is that I think we as humans often still often tend to think that our frequency range, our hearing, our um uh range of loudness um is uh just the same for all other animals. And this can pose problems. If if you have animals who are very sensitive to loudness and you play loud music for them, it will just cause them distress. There are so many scientific studies which prove that uh these and these and these species prefer silence over music just because it's too loud for them, it's disturbing them. And on the other hand, if you um if if you manage to you know to to create a species-specific music, as scientists and musicians in some cases have done, then uh it can be uh really positive for the animals. There is a beautiful study by Charles Snowden and David Tay on um uh what um uh what monkeys um uh uh like and dislike about music. And uh uh they uh uh they tested um I think on on cotton top tamarinds, uh they tested uh human music, and the tamarinds didn't like it. And then David Tay, as a musician, composed new music in the frequency range, in the rhythmic structures of tamarind vocalizations, and they liked it. So um you can you can I think you can use music to to dominate animals, and many of the stuff on the internet actually shows that and is in the in the in my eyes uh this picklebigle tradition of you know um having animals dance in circuses and in the streets to to human music. And there are beautiful examples of interspecies relations and interspecies bonding via shared musical practices. Uh, I mean you you mentioned this uh dialogue uh I had some years ago um with uh I think it was uh Dario Martinelli and others who were musicologists, and David Rothenberg, who is a philosopher and musician who does interspecies music. And some of the work of David is so beautiful because he he's out there and he's trying to make contact, like aesthetic contact, musical contact with other animals. And and this can be actually this can be very convincing and uh very special moments can emerge uh in these constellations.

SPEAKER_03: 47:05

Yeah, thank you for that, and thank you also for kind of drawing the ethics to it as well, that that not all musical experiences are one and the same, and and actually, even when you're trying to have an aesthetic experience or a connection, you know, like Dinesh Wadi well also speaks of conflict zones, that just because you want to connect, sometimes animals don't want to connect with you, and you might need to respect that they want to walk away or that they don't want to dance or that they don't want to listen to your music, and that's their prerogative, too. And so, yeah, thank you for highlighting that. I think that's a really important thing, is just because we want to and we like it doesn't mean it should be what happens. Um, so no, thank you so much. This has been really enlightening. I think, yeah, again, culture, aesthetics, art, music, these are all things that we've come to think of as human. And I think you've shown so well in this episode today how disrupted they are and they're increasingly becoming, and I think that's just wonderful. Um perhaps you could tell us a little bit about your quote now. I know you have a quote ready, or you're you're grappling with different quotes. So perhaps you could tell us a bit.

SPEAKER_01: 48:10

I brought several quotes, but as you just highlighted the ethics of this, you know, animal-human music interaction. I think I I actually will chose a short quote by by a fellow zoo musicologist, um, Hollis Taylor. She's a musician and a composer, and she does uh very interesting musicological research on uh music and animals. And I have a quote from an article she published last year. The title of the article is How Musical Are Animals. And uh in the quote, she talks about nature aesthetics and of the ethical consequences and of the ethical benefits zoo musicology, so a musicology for the more than human could have. And I quote Hollis Taylor This kind of nature aesthetics has particular cultural relevance in the anthropocene. Following the work of Rassian D'Esprey from 2012, one might argue that if zoomusicologists are successful in making animals interesting, people will be more interested in them. A number of authors observe that the climate crisis and decrease in the planet's biodiversity are as much cultural as scientific in nature. With climate contrarian distrust mounting a scientific consensus solidified. In this situation, facts are not enough to change human attitudes, behaviors, and institutions, but spaces energized by animal music do enjoy such potential. Understanding that the success of a performance to deliver an environmental message and inspire change is not automatic, zoo musicologists are nonetheless ideally placed at this time to produce works that function in terms of artistic quality while also being relevant ecologically, ethically, and even politically. End of quote.

SPEAKER_03: 50:16

Amazing. And you know, what what came to mind there for me almost immediately were whale songs. Because you think um, I mean, those was it I listened, I listened to something just the other day. I think it was in National Geographic. I'm not 100% sure if it was National Geographic, but they distributed the whale recordings happened, and they wanted to show their readers what it was about. So they distributed these whale recordings, which I think is just fascinating. Um and that ended up bringing this whole awareness and attention to whale song and whale music. But this was also a human production, right? There was humans, as I as I spoke to like Cheryl about it. You these are humans recording it and actually producing it or making a CD or making, I guess, it's comprehensible in the way humans understand music. Um, and so you've got this human product, but it's whale music. So it's something that they've produced together. And those songs brought this awareness to whales and their plight in a way that actually saved them. So I think what you're saying there is this music is political and it's emotive. And I I really don't think that we we are, we like to think of ourselves as rational beings, but I think we're more emotional beings. I think we make decisions based on what we feel is is right.

SPEAKER_01: 51:34

Yeah, totally true. The the whale song, the the cultural history of whale song here, humpback whale song, is a beautiful example, I think. And um it's a beautiful example for these entanglements, as Donna Harway would say, uh, in media nature, because as you already might know, uh the whales in the beginning weren't recorded because anybody would have been interested in whale song. It was eavesdropping in the beginning of the Cold War to locate Soviet uh uh uh uh uh Soviet submarines, um uh uh and and then there were those strange singing sounds in these recordings, and the the the NATO spies uh with their hydrophones were like, What is this? That's not a submarine, and it turned out to be whale song. And and then the bioacousticians used this material and used it, as you just said, to distribute it to a to a broader public. And yeah, it it I I agree, it saved the whales and it brought um brought uh new mainstream attention to to the culture of animals, that that animals have have their music, have their culture, and that we are not allowed to to to destroy uh and extinct these cultures. And and I think Hollis's quote just goes in this direction. If people hadn't listened to Whale Song, and I mean this record really was a huge, it it really was a hit record, uh you could say, in the 1970s, if if people hadn't listened to whale song, uh they wouldn't have cared. So there's this this emotional strength and this this emotive impact uh of music, and I think uh we should use it for the good cause and not pretend that aesthetics is just an autonomous realm which has nothing to do with ethics or politics. It's all entangled in the Anthropocene, and we we we do good to acknowledge that and and uh hopefully to use it for something that turns out good.

SPEAKER_03: 53:41

I think you're exactly right. I think there's a reason why music, even if I don't know the name of a song or I don't know the name of a band, I think there's a reason why when a particular chord hits or a particular song hits, of course it's my own culture and my own history and where I'm situated, but there's a reason why I don't need to think about it. It just does something. I feel the sting in my nose or the sting in my eyes, or I feel my heart quicken. It's it's um it's a feeling thing, but it's also a political thing. It can be a rise to action, it can be a rise to do, it can be a rise to be, it can, yeah. This is just really, I think, beautiful. And I think I need to go listen to more music today. Um, so that's gonna be my mission for the day. Before we close, uh could you perhaps tell us a little bit about what you're working on now and if uh folks are interested in getting in touch with you, how they could do so?

SPEAKER_01: 54:32

Oh, yeah, uh sure. Um actually I'm working on um some quite uh different projects. One is an uh a book, an edited volume. Uh The Call for Papers has actually just closed, and it's actually about the dark side of um animal soundscapes, you could say. It's uh about uh dystopian soundscapes and uh uh human the human voice and the more than human voices in dystopian contexts. Um actually uh uh we editors were afraid that uh this gloomy subject wouldn't attract too much uh interest, but uh we have received uh a lot of very interesting submissions, and I hope we will develop the book over the next year and publish it uh in the beginning of the year after. And and I'm I am in uh I'm a bit hesitant to speak about it, but I have to bring it out in an octopus project. And I'm hesitant because um yeah, um not so long ago the the scientific uh uh standpoint was uh octopus are deaf, they have no uh soundscape, umwelt at all. But uh this has changed recently, and the octopus uh has turned out to be a very interesting um animal, uh as we I think all know now, um as a sentient, highly intelligent, and sometimes even social being. And there are so many connections with music. Uh, I wouldn't have thought about it in the first way. So um I'm I'm actually doing some research on uh relationships between octopus and music, being on a metaphorical, on a cultural, uh historical, but also uh on a scientific level. And I'm involved in um a project between the arts uh and uh the academia, which is called Octo Lab.

SPEAKER_03: 56:32

Wow, that's fascinating. Yeah, I mean I think octopus is octopi. Um they are I think, yeah, they've I think with um my octopus teacher coming out recently, I think they've written people's imaginations in a way that uh you know is quite new. And uh what book did I read last year? I think I think it was called Other Minds, Other Minds. Um and they are just really oh, there we go, you've got it.

SPEAKER_01: 56:58

Um this was one of the other quotes I was thinking about because Peter Godfrey Smith he talks so beautifully about the octopus. Like um the octopus, the central brain is like a conductor, but the rest of the nervous system is like jazz musicians who don't follow the conductor too close, but they, you know, um just roughly uh uh um and it's it's it's such a beautiful figure for what the octopus is uh when it comes to to consciousness. It's uh yeah, it's fascinating.

SPEAKER_03: 57:29

And that's that's another thing we didn't even get into is how like metaphors of music and animals play into one another in literature, in arts, in music, you know. We use musical metaphors to describe animals, and we use animals to describe music. Um so there is this kind of synergy between how we we think, which is really fascinating. Oh, wow, I think we could talk for days. Um if folks want to get in touch with you, how do they find out uh and and find out more and reach out to you?

SPEAKER_01: 58:01

Maybe you can uh uh put on the uh website of the podcast uh our our Facebook uh and our uh Twitter channel um um of my professorship uh in Nuremberg. And uh there people, if they like to, can follow my work and uh uh the works of my colleagues in Nuremberg, where we try to establish musicology and uh human studies, uh human animal studies uh uh center. And maybe I can hint at an idea of us, which hopefully we'll realize in about a year. Um we are trying to establish a um study program, a master program, uh, which would give uh students the opportunity to um to uh study uh interdisciplinary musicology um with an emphasis on human animal studies uh which I see as a neighboring field uh on artificial intelligence and music. Uh so yeah, something very um uh post-humanist uh uh um is going on in in music research right now.

SPEAKER_03: 59:06

That sounds amazing. Um yeah, I think I last thing I'll say here, because I yeah, I I think I listened to a podcast, I cannot remember her name, but she was a musician and then she became a neuroscientist, and then those interests collide, and then she started to think about AI and stuff as well. So that's like a whole different thing about like subjectivity and music and ownership. Yeah, but I'm not gonna take up any more of your time. Um, thank you so much for being a fantastic guest. It was really a joy to have you on the show.

SPEAKER_01: 59:35

Thank you so much, Claudia. It was wonderful to be there, and it was an honor to to be on the show. Thank you.

SPEAKER_03: 59:53

I'm excited for this today's animal highlight. You you mentioned that we're gonna be speaking about coyotes, right?

SPEAKER_04: 1:00:00

Yeah, yeah. I've had some fun learning about them.

SPEAKER_03: 1:00:04

Well, I'm um um the reason I'm quite excited is I saw my very first uh coyotes this week, actually. I've never seen coyotes. Yeah. Um I was walking my sister's dogs um here in in BC in Gibson's and uh all of a sudden the dogs started going bonkers. Um and our 12-year-old beagle was like and uh he was really excited and he was on a little mound and I had to like clamber up this mound. And as as my head peeked over, I saw he was on a stand for the coyote. Coyote was just looking at him. Um and then the second, but Rowdy was standing his ground, and the coyote wasn't really doing anything, just seemed more curious. And then the second the coyote saw me, it took like three steps back, but then kept watching, and then I was watching, and then all of a sudden, two other coyote heads from another mound popped up, and they were all watching, so we were all just watching each other, and Rowdy was very slightly berserk, but beautiful. Wow, I've I've never I've never um seen coyotes before. Uh and and of course, our our fellow classmates at Queen's University, Lauren Van Pater, she did her PhD with them.

SPEAKER_04: 1:01:12

So I'm really excited to learn about she will be disgusted in what comes that only thing we know about Lauren, she's never disgusted. She's she's just not that she's disgusted, we won't be disgusting.

SPEAKER_02: 1:01:31

Sorry, we lost some words. Oh my gosh, that's so funny. It's a good thing I corrected. Okay, okay, okay, okay. All right, uh you take it away.

SPEAKER_04: 1:01:42

Okay, well, so we are gonna talk about coyotes. Um, and one of the reasons for this is obviously this week you and Martin talked about music, and coyotes are often called, well, one of the names for them is is the song dog, and that's because they have these particularly elaborate repertoire of vocalizations, which if you have ever camped in the western part of the US at least, sorry, that's very specific because that's my experience, you will hear these elaborate vocalizations, um, and they can be quite kind of scary if you're not you don't you don't know very much about coyotes, which they were for me as a girl from from England where we don't have very many big animals. But they make these incredible sounds, and the reason for them being scary I will uh talk about in a minute. But so they have these elaborate repertoires, these very kind of complex sounds that they make. And Lauren Van Pater, a friend of the podcast, friend of us, who recently finished her uh PhD um about coyotes in her dissertation. She talks about how they're kind of considered the most vocal North American mammal, and she lists the different vocalizations, how they're kind of turpified by science. Um, and so examples of that are a growl, a huff, a woof, bark, bark howl, whine, yelp, lone howl, group yip howl. The list goes on. There are many, many ways that they're kind of a warble is my favorite, and a gargle.

SPEAKER_02: 1:03:14

A warble.

SPEAKER_04: 1:03:16

And so with the one that they're most known for is the group yip howl. Um, and hopefully we'll be able to listen to that. And there that that usually happens when they kind of reunite or when they're about to separate before they go hunting. Um, so it's kind of about territorial occupancy, as well as keeping trespasses as well away, and as a kind of social bonding, so says Brian Lerner, who's a coyote sound researcher. And so, because of all of these elaborate repertoires, they're not only known as being the song dog, but they're also kind of known as being tricksters. Um, and kind of mythologically they've always been known as tricksters. And that's partly because of what is known as the Beau Jest effect, which is French, so I'm not sure if I pronounced it right. So, this effect was kind of first uh proposed by a man called Fred Harrington in 1989, and this is a hypothesis which kind of was first thought about in terms of songbirds, um, and then eventually two terms like wolves and uh coyotes. And it's this effect where you feel like you're hearing a lot more of the animals than there actually are. So you might there might only be two coyotes kind of doing these yip hows, but it might sound that there's like four or six of them. And it's called the Bow Jest effect based on this book, which is about this fit this fiction book where uh there's people at war and they um kind of pretend that they prop up their their fallen soldiers to make it seem as though they're alive, um, so that the people they're fighting against feel like there's more more people than there actually are. So that's kind of where the where the uh phrase comes from. And so when it comes to coyotes, they're considered to be trickers because um people think they're kind of doing this deliberately, that that coyotes and and wolves as well are kind of um deliberately using these kind of sonic tactics uh to make it sound like there are more of them than there actually are, so that they kind of come across as as being more commanding in the territory, so that other kind of coyotes won't infringe upon them and things like that. But it seems from my limited knowledge that we don't 100% know if this is kind of a deliberate thing or if it's just kind of a trick of of the environment. So kind of the these complex sounds mixed with like echoes um of the places in which coyotes usually inhabit just makes it sound like there's a lot more of them than there are. But this kind of effect was was tested um by Kyle Brester and colleagues in 2017, where they played uh recordings of one to four howling and yapping coyotes to some for over 400 people, and they found that people consistently overestimated the number of coyotes they heard twofold. So they always thought it was double the amount of coyotes than they actually heard. And what's interesting about that study is that they did it with captive coyotes, so they kind of recorded them in after capturing them, um, which would kind of which would maybe make it seem as though it wasn't a trick of the environment and the echoes that were making it sound like there were more of them than they actually were. It was more to do with kind of the way that they use these and stitch together these all these different kinds of vocalizations they have.

SPEAKER_03: 1:06:58

So it's not actually physiological, it's not a physiological um thing. It's not like they have two voice boxes or something like that. They're actually just manipulating how they call to give the illusion that there are multiple, multiple coyotes.

SPEAKER_04: 1:07:13

Yeah, it seems to be that way that there are just so many different ways that they can call and they kind of do them one after another so kind of quickly that it makes it seem like there's more of them than they're actually than they're actually. Yeah, that's all I really had to say about coyotes. Other than that, um, because of this fact, that's one of the reasons that people think they're and one thing that Lauren talks a lot about is that people kind of have this fear of coyotes that is potentially, you know, not justified. Um, and and part of the reason for that is that people overestimate their number because of this effect. And so, for example, in Texas ranching communities, they always they often think that what's killing off their livestock is coyotes because they have this overestimate, overinflated idea of how many of them there actually are because they're always hearing them, but actually for the most part, it's not coyotes, it's um it's other animals. So it's kind of people think they're a nuisance when they're when they're maybe not. So, yes, maybe we played music with the coyotes and took advantage of those this their songmaking abilities that it was.

SPEAKER_03: 1:08:17

This is really fascinating. Again, it just shows the significance of thinking about animals with sound, I think, and how how sound can actually illuminate some of these relationships, uh, trouble them, but also uh trouble some of our actions and our responses to animals. Uh so that was amazing. Thank you. Thank you again, Hannah. Thank you so much. Thank you to Martin for being a wonderful guest, to Hannah Hunter for the Animal Highlight, to Gordon Clark for the Bad Music, and Jeremy John for the logo. As always, thank you to Animals and Philosophy, Politics, Law and Ethics Apple for sponsoring this podcast, and to SAP Lab at the Sonic Arts Studio for sponsoring this season, too. Um, make sure to check out my website for more details related to these sponsors, or just go straight to their websites and check them out. They do some great work and they're definitely worth a visit. Uh, we're full steam ahead now, folks, so uh you'll be hearing more from me soon. Yay! Have a wonderful day.

SPEAKER_00: 1:09:18

This is The Animal Turn with me, Claudia Huttenfelder For more great iRull Podcasts, visit irallpod.com. That's I R O A R P O D.com.