The calls of grassland birds are higher frequency and faster tempo than those of forest birds. Forest birds produce low-frequency sounds and high-pitched chirps. Perhaps, after humans moved from forests to grasslands, they acquired vocalizations that allowed them to effectively communicate information with their companions in unobstructed environments. Male birds that could sing many songs were healthier and therefore gained a better impression from many female birds. Or perhaps they strived to improve their singing skills to gain a good impression. The vocalization system of birds seems to generate the urge to reproduce and sing when hormone levels increase. Birds sing to leave offspring. Females accept the advances of males with good songs. Spring calls are the calls of small birds fighting for their survival. “Autumn songs,” on the other hand, are expressions of play with no particular function. This shows that birds can also play.
It was already known that attractive courtship calls by male animals attract females. Recently, however, it has been discovered that these attractive calls tend to be pleasing to human ears as well. A research team from Yale University in the US and McGill University in Canada investigated these courtship calls and human preferences for them. Their research revealed commonalities in sound preferences between humans and animals. The research team used online games to investigate people’s preferences. They asked over 4,000 people worldwide to compare courtship calls with other sounds and choose which they found more appealing. One of the two sounds was a courtship call preferred by female animals. They compared two courtship calls from 16 different male species, including monkeys, and asked which they found more appealing. In the two-sound comparison, humans also tended to choose the courtship call that attracted females. This suggests that aesthetic sensibilities, such as timbre and rhythm, may be more universal than previously thought.
Margaret Boden is a leading expert in creativity research in the fields of cognitive science and artificial intelligence (AI). She is known for classifying creativity into three types: combination creativity, exploratory creativity, and transformational creativity. Combination creativity creates something new by combining existing ideas and knowledge. Exploratory creativity creates something new by exploring existing ideas and knowledge using some kind of rules or procedures. And transformational creativity creates something completely new by transcending the boundaries of existing ideas and knowledge. Generative AI clearly possesses two types of “creativity”: combination creativity and exploratory creativity. AI is creating cultural content that is the first of its kind. However, when it comes to transformational creativity, AI is still in the experimental stage. If elements such as animal hearing are introduced, it may become possible to approach transformational creativity.
