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1 results

  • Chapter 5 - Animal Music

  • from Part II
  • Melissa Dickson, University of Queensland
  • Book:
    Acoustics in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Science
    Published online:
    13 December 2024
    Print publication:
    19 December 2024, pp 105-126

  • Summary

    Chapter 5 considers the ways in which animal responses to music were used as evidence of their intelligence and sensitivities. In the context of the cultural and philosophical search for the origins of music in so-called primitive forms of communication and animal cries, the medium of music provided a means of constructing and imaginatively exploring animal subjectivities, while positing an experience of listening that lay entirely beyond the limits of the human self. Such discussions, though at times making use of scientific data, contained a wealth of anecdotal evidence and casual observations, which I include as a critical component of understandings of animals and music in both the popular and scientific imagination of the period. I also consider the musical animals of fiction by George Eliot and Charles Dickens in order to demonstrate that music offers a familiar point of access into the unfamiliar mind of the other.