ResearchWorks: Animal Music

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Interdisciplinarity is central to Emily Doolittle's work, both as a researcher and as a composer. In this presentation she will discuss her decades-long interest in the relationship between animal songs and human music.

After a brief introduction to the field of zoomusicology, Emily will share the wide range of practice-based and traditional research methods she uses to approach her curiosity about animal song, including composition, collaborative research with biologists, musicological research, historical and cultural study of how we hear animal song, and playing music live with animals. The session will discuss what we can and can’t learn from each of these approaches, and why Emily believes we need all of these approaches and more to better understand animal songs and vocalisation.

The presentation will end with a brief discussion of why Emily thinks listening to and striving to understand animal song is not only fascinating, but is essential as we try to find our way through the environmental crisis.

Speaker:

Emily Doolittle is a Canada-born, Glasgow-based composer and researcher with a longstanding musical and research interest in zoomusicology, the study of music-like aspects of animal songs. She has explored this in a compositions such as Woodwings (commissioned by Fifth Wind) and Reedbird (commissioned by the Vancouver Symphony), as well as in her doctoral dissertation at Princeton and in collaborative research with biologists and ornithologists. Recent publications include Playing music to animals: An interdisciplinary approach to improving our understanding of animals' responses to music (with BP Kriengwatana, RG Nager, A South and M Ullrich, Animal Behaviour 2025); Scarce inferior to the nightingale: Hermit thrush song as a symbol of cultural identity in anglophone North America. (Ecomusicology Review 2021); and Hearken to the Hermit Thrush: A Case Study in Interdisciplinary Listening (Frontiers in Psychology 2020).

Emily is also interested in art and the environment, and was awarded Royal Society of Edinburgh Research Workshop funding to co-organize the talk and concert series Art-Making in the Anthropocene with colleagues Sarah Hopfinger and Stuart MacRae. Other research and compositional interests include folklore, musical story-telling, music and gender, and parenthood and creativity. Emily has worked at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland since 2017, where she is an Athenaeum Research Fellow and Lecturer in Composition.