![]() ![]() To the merry green fields of the farm-yard.įrederick Thomas Nettleingham's 1917 book Tommy's Tunes, a collection of World War I era songs, includes a variant of the song called "Ohio" which lists nine species: horses (neigh-neigh), dogs (bow-wow/woof woof/ruff ruff), chickens(hen=cluck cluck/ chicks=chick chick), ducks (quack quack), goose (Honk Honk), cows (moo moo), pigs (grunt grunt), cats (meow meow), sheep/ goat (baa baa) and a donkey(MULE) (hee-haw). Six pretty maids come and gang a-long o' me ![]() ![]() Here a moo, there a moo, Here a pretty moo. Goodey at Marylebone Workhouse, London and the lyrics began with the following verse: The famous folk song collector Cecil Sharp collected a version called "The Farmyard" in 1908 from a 74-year-old named Mrs. Several versions were collected in England in around the turn of the twentieth century by folklorists, such as one called "The Farmyard Song" taken from a John Lloyd of Manchester in the 1880s by Anne Gilchrist, and another called "Father's Wood I O" collected in 1906 in Scotter, Lincolnshire by Percy Grainger both of the original transcriptions of these versions are available via the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library website. It also appeared on song sheets for decades, so it was presumably popular among ordinary English people in the eighteenth century whether it originated from the opera or not. 2 (1719) and appearing in several operas throughout the eighteenth century such as John Gay and Johann Christoph Pepusch's Polly (1729). Like modern versions, the animals change from verse to verse and the rhythm is very similar, but it uses a different minor key melody.ĭ'Urfey's opera was largely unsuccessful, but the song was recycled, being expanded and printed in d'Urfey's own Wit and Mirth, or Pills to Purge Melancholy, vol. It is unknown whether this was the origin of the song, or if his version of the song was based on a traditional song already in existence. Here a Boo, there a Boo, every where a Boo, The earliest variant of the song is "In the Fields in Frost and Snow" from a 1706 opera called The Kingdom of the Birds or Wonders of the Sun written by the English writer and composer Thomas d'Urfey. Follow Life's Little Mysteries on Twitter llmysteries, then join us on Facebook.Thomas d'Urfey (1653-1723) Thomas d'Urfey He added, "To that extent, we understand music in a different way than animals do."įollow Natalie Wolchover on Twitter nattyover. They can learn to recognize a sequence of notes, but if you transpose the notes to a different key, so that the sequence uses the same relative notes but the key is different, they can't recognize the relationships between the notes anymore." "I have found that animals have very good absolute pitch, but they don't have relative pitch. ![]() "We can recognize that a sequence of notes is the same whether it's in the key of F or A flat," he said. According to Snowdon, they lack an important musical ability that we possess: relative pitch. But no matter how well composers perfect their dog, cat and monkey songs, the animals will probably never appreciate their species-specific music quite as much as humans appreciate ours. "Our own research has shown that dogs certainly behave differently in response to different types of music, e.g., showing behaviors more suggestive of relaxation in response to classical music and behaviors more suggestive of agitation in response to heavy metal music," Wells wrote in an email.Ĭonsidering the great demand for new ways to please our pets, more progress is likely to be made in the field of animal music. Research led by Deborah Wells, a psychologist at Queen's University Belfast, shows that dogs can discern between human music of different genres. Indeed, some dogs do appear to respond emotionally to human music. My prediction is that a big dog might be more responsive to human music than a smaller dog such as a Chihuahua," Snowdon said. "So, it is possible that they might be responsive to music in our frequency range. However, large dogs such as Labradors or mastiffs have vocal ranges that are quite similar to those of adult male humans. On the basis of their results, Teie has started selling cat songs online (at $1.99 per song) through a company called "Music for Cats."ĭogs are a tougher audience, mostly because breeds vary widely in size, vocal range and heart rate. "We find that cats prefer to listen to the music composed in their frequency range and tempo rather than human music." "We have some work-in-progress where we've transposed music and put it in the frequency range for cat vocalizations, and have used their resting heart rate, which is faster than ours," he told Life's Little Mysteries. Snowdon and Teie have moved on to composing music for cats, and studying how they respond to it. ![]()
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