Yesterday it was monkey math, today it’s rodent rockers. As it turns out, a study of the ultrasonic vocalisations of mice mouse indicates they sing. Yep, singing male mice, singing to attract females. Timothy E. Holy and Zhongsheng Guo of the Washington University School of Medicine Department of Anatomy and Neurobiology (located in St. Louis, Missouri) compare their findings to bird songs and those of mammals such as whales and humans. It appears on a molecular level perhaps related to FOXP2 transcription (which btw, also effect transcription of other genes and expressed in the brain), which is directly related to language. FOXP2 is super interesting from the perspectives of human evolutionary modelling and comparative genomics, but I digress.
Anyway, rodents do indeed utter complex vocalisations (i.e., syllabic diversity; pitch; cadence) and they appear to be advertisement songs. The article includes samples (.wav) of the songs which have been pitch-adjusted by the scientists to make these ultrasonic tunes (two octaves above our range) audible to us humans.
It will be very cool when neurobiologists can better explain what makes us respond to music the way we do, building upon work such as this.
