I began my time at the lab as part of my fourth year project and from the very beginning I wanted to do something involved with music preferences in animals. This is currently a very exciting area of research with the potential to greatly inform us on the evolutionary origins of our own musicality. Although I originally planned on studying music perception in chimpanzees, birds have been much more promising as animal models for a wide variety of musical abilities – from magpies finishing each other’s songs to parrots ‘dancing’ in-rhythm to simple beats. Within this varied literature however, no one has so far attempted to investigate musical perceptions in a wild sample of animals – so with the help of the Cooperation Lab, I decided to attempt the first field study on birds’ musical preferences. Whilst an ambitious and difficult investigation, this information could be vital for understanding how seabirds’ auditory capacity differs from that of songbirds, and therefore better informing us on the presence of musicality across differing bird taxa