Sloths Invented Music (#170(
Are you confused by the title of this post? Good.
Are you going to unsubscribe now? That’s fine with me. I realized that I lose at least one subscriber every time I post an animal fact. I think it’s quite funny by now and it certainly won’t stop me from posting them.
Anyways. Sloths (de: Faultiere) are popular nowadays (for obvious reasons), but there’s something about them, many don’t know. When the European conquerors first came to the Americas, they weren’t so impressed by the sloth’s slowliness or cuteness, but rather by their sounds.
Apparently, the sound of female sloths is a high pitch scream. But with every scream, the pitch lowers a bit, just as if the sloths were singing a scale. This led to the myth, that the sloths actually invented music, notably the hexachord. The hexachord is a series of six notes in a scale and was for example popular in Gregorian chants and other church music in the Middle Ages. (Here you can listen to an example from Wikipedia.) Also in books, they were predominantly mentioned because of their singing, here’s an example, even featuring the musical notes.
Tomorrow I let you know how many subscribers left.