from Exploring Music’s Hold on the Mind - A CONVERSATION WITH ANIRUDDH D. PATEL (NYTimes)
Q. RECENTLY, YOU’VE BEEN WORKING WITH A SULFUR-CRESTED COCKATOO NAMED SNOWBALL. WHAT PROMPTED THE COLLABORATION?
A. Before I encountered Snowball, I wondered whether human music had been shaped for our brains by evolution — meaning, it helped us survive at some point. Well, in 2008, a colleague asked me to view a YouTube video of a cockatoo who appeared to be dancing to the beat of “Everybody” by the Backstreet Boys!
My jaw hit the floor. If you saw a video of a dog reading a newspaper out loud, you’d be pretty impressed, right? To people in the music community, a cockatoo dancing to a beat was like that. This was supposed to be, some said, a uniquely human behavior! If this was real, it meant that the bird might have circuits in its brain for processing beat similar to ours.
Q. WHAT DID YOU DO WITH THIS INSIGHT?
A. I phoned up the bird shelter in Indiana where Snowball lived and talked to the director who told me his story. A man had dropped him off with a CD and the comment, “Snowball likes to dance to this.”
