Music, Animals, and Rights after 1950 in the United States

FAIN: FEL-281756-22

Rachel Marie Mundy
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, Newark (Newark, NJ 07104-3010)

Research and writing leading to a book about connections between music research and American zoology from 1950 to 2000.

Between 1950 and 2000, a group of women pioneered a wave of research that used music to transform the way we hear whales, parrots, bonobos, dolphins, elephants, and other animals. Why did musical skills accomplish what decades of science had not? My book project Hearing Beyond Humanism: Music, Animals, and Rights after 1950 asks this question in the first significant study of collaborations between American zoology and music research. In this book I examine how zoologists used musical listening skills, showing how they eventually argued that musical animals had rights traditionally understood as “human.” By placing this research within the broader context of civil and human rights during the 1960s and 1970s, my book shows how America’s postwar humanities culture shaped modern discoveries about the natural world.