Animal DJs and Digital Musical Instruments: An Unrelated Analysis

The other day I was sent a TikTok of dog behind a DJ controller blasting techno music in a dingy, yellow-tiled area that might as well be the backdrop to the latest backrooms video. With over 1.2 million views, the TikTok is quite popular, and it’s easy to see why; the unsettling setting and abrasive music is a perfect foil to the cute and somewhat confused looking dog, making for perfect shortform content. The video was interesting enough, but the more I thought about it, the more I was curious about what animals really could DJ, and which ones might be best for the task. 

Of course, the first step in being a good DJ is knowing and understanding music, so only animals with some capability of musicality (at least as it relates to humans) should even be considered. Research has been done that shows that different animals prefer different types of ‘music’ at different speeds and frequencies corresponding to the sounds they are themselves able to produce. For instance, tamarins were found be receptive to higher pitched, fast songs incorporating “excited monkey tones”, an undeniably interesting concept with many questions behind it (who is doing this research anyway???), but not necessarily something that would sound good to humans. Dogs, however, have similar vocal ranges to humans, so the likelihood that they could be good DJs is less far-fetched. Dogs have already been trained to play music by memory, though the extent to which they genuinely know what they are playing is uncertain. So, it seems that dogs, among others, would probably make decent DJs (for human standards, at least). And while I may be horribly unqualified to speak on which animals would understand human music, there are certain animals I’d like to see DJ, even if they wouldn’t really be any good. 

I’d love to see an octopus DJ; with eight arms and nine brains, it’s a certainty that they would make crazy mixes if only they could understand the music. Chimps would be a pretty clear contender with their similarities to humans. Elephants have the brains – and the ears – for DJing, it would just be a matter of figuring out how to get their trunks working with a DJ controller. Actually though, maybe it’s unfair to make animals use human equipment; if we want the best performances out of animals, it only makes sense to meet them where they’re at, building them custom controllers so they could make mixes in a way that works best for them. This leads us into the weird world of digital musical instruments, or instruments that are made with unconventional data-capturing tools and programmed to extend the possibilities of their play.

Plenty of human-based DMIs already exist; ranging from Wii remotes that play like a violin, to gloves that can control the human voice, to motion-tracking DJ controllers (something that I’m particularly interested in), DMIs already allow for a wide range of musical expression. Extending this expression to animals seems like a very interesting proposition, and whether it would work as intended or not, it would yield some unique results. Imagine a device that could control 8 audio channels in response to octopus tentacles, or a pressure sensitive controller that could change parameters based on the pressure of an elephant’s trunk, or even a device that could be controlled by the mouth and paws of a dog. These types of devices would make sounds that no human could recreate, and even if they might not result in the most sonically pleasing sets, there would be something worthwhile in hearing something alien to human capabilities. Maybe the answer to my question about what animals can DJ is that any of them can, so long as we have the creativity and desire to give them the tools to engage with music that we can understand. Maybe someday animals will even be able to DJ music that suits their own tastes: I’d personally love to hear a DJ set of tamarin-made excited monkey tones.