Zoomusicology is the study of the music of non-human animals,
or the musical aspects of sounds produced by non-human animals.
As George Herzog (1941) asked, do animals have music?
Francois-Bernard Mache's Musique, mythe, nature, ou les Dauphins d'Arion (1983),
a study of ornitho-musicology using a technique of Nicolas Ruwet's Language,
musique, poesie (1972) paradigmatic segmentation analysis,
shows that bird songs are organised according to a repetition-transformation
principle. Jean-Jacques Nattiez (1990), argues that in the last analysis,
it is a human being who decides what is and is not musical,
even when the sound is not of human origin.
If we acknowledge that sound is not organised and
conceptualised (that is, made to form music) merely by its producer,
but by the mind that perceives it, then music is uniquely human.