Ronan the sea lion is as cute as a cockatoo when she bobs her head in time with "Boogie Wonderland," but this isn't just one more viral video: The researchers behind the experiment say it challenges current conceptions about how animals keep the beat.

A team from the University of California at Santa Cruz says Ronan is the first non-human mammal to show convincing scientific evidence of beat-keeping. She thus follows in the trailblazing footsteps of Snowball the Cockatoo, Alex the Parrot and other birds that have demonstrated you don't have to be human to get rhythm.

"The fact that we showed Ronan could do it means that there's a raw capability in sea lions," lead researcher Peter Cook, a graduate student in psychology at UC-Santa Cruz, told NBC News.

That's precisely what poses the challenge: Previously, scientists had assumed that the ability to move in time with a beat was connected to the ability for vocal learning and vocal mimicry, That's something that humans, cockatoos, parrots and budgies can do. But sea lions aren't mimics. When was the last time you heard a sea lion say, "Polly wants a snapper"?

"Our finding represents a cautionary note for an idea that was really starting to take hold in the field of comparative psychology," Cook said in a news release. The experiments with Ronan appear in Monday's issue of the Journal of Comparative Psychology.

Ronan was born in the wild in 2008, but apparently wasn't suited for life in the wild. Rescuers had to save her from being stranded three times — and after the third time, she was taken into captivity. In 2010, she joined UC-Santa Cruz's Pinniped Cognition and Sensory Systems Laboratory and took part in control studies focusing on the effects of a natural neurotoxin produced by algae on the California coast.

C. Reichmuth / UCSC

Graduate student Peter Cook trained Ronan, a California sea lion, to bob her head in time with a rhythm.

Cook's beat-keeping study was a side project, sparked in part by Ronan's facility for rapid learning. "From my first interactions with her, it was clear that Ronan was a particularly bright sea lion," Cook said. "Everybody in the animal cognition world, including me, was intrigued by the dancing-bird studies, but I remember thinking that on one had attempted a strong effort to show beat-keeping in an animal other than a parrot. I figured training a mammal to move in time to music would be hard, but Ronan seemed like an ideal subject."

Cook and research technician Andrew Rouse spent several months training Ronan to pay heed to a musical beat, working mostly on the weekends. They started out with a simple rhythm track, with food serving as a reward for the proper head-bobbing behavior. Eventually, Ronan could bob her head in time with a variety of tunes, including some that she was hearing for the first time. (Cook said "Boogie Wonderland" appears to be her favorite.)

Now Cook is wondering whether Snowball and other avian beat-keepers came by their musical ability innately, or whether they picked up their training from the humans they live with. "Some of these parrots are not intentionally trained, but they do have decades of complex interaction with humans," he said.

Even humans may need help when it comes to moving with the rhythm. (If you've ever seen me dance, you'd be certain of it.) "The literature on this is a bit fractured, but there's some evidence of 'apprenticeship' in beat-keeping, even in humans," Cook said.

Can other species be trained to boogie down? Cook and his colleagues intend to find out. "We know some people who have horses, and a lot of people who have dogs," he said. And if Ronan's boogie goes viral, there may well be lots more videos to check out. "I wouldn't be surprised if we get some people coming out of the woodwork with some verifiable cases," Cook said.

Have you seen animals that can move in time with the music? Share your stories in the comment section below.

Update for 9:10 p.m. April 2: Adena Schachner, a post-doctoral researcher at Boston University who has studied beat-keeping birds such as Snowball and Alex, said in an email that the newly published study "provides an important step toward understanding the evolution and cognition of keeping a beat":

"Since (as far as we know) sea lions cannot imitate sound, I agree with the authors that this work falsifies the idea that the capacity for vocal imitation is a necessary precondition for entrainment.

"However, it's interesting to note that some closely related marine mammals — harbor seals — are known to imitate sound. This makes me wonder whether sea lions might have inherited some (though not all) of the cognitive machinery associated with vocal imitation from a vocal-mimicking common ancestor of seals and sea lions. If their common ancestor was able to imitate sound, this leaves open a weaker version of the vocal learning hypothesis, in which the capacity for vocal mimicry is not needed for entrainment, but a history of selection for vocal mimicry is still needed to produce the relevant brain mechanisms. These brain mechanisms may then be partially conserved over the course of evolution, supporting entrainment even if the capacity for vocal imitation disappears.

"That's probably a longer and more nuanced story than you were looking for! But the bottom line is: I think this is important and interesting work, and makes a strong case for entrainment in sea lions. This new finding, in conjunction with past findings of entrainment in parrots (and humans), helps lead us toward a greater understanding of the evolutionary and cognitive basis of our ability to move in time to music."

More about animal aptitude:

• Cats take on owners' habits, good and bad
• Tunes that rock your dog's world
• What do dolphins and dogs know?

In addition to Cook and Rouse, the authors of "A California Sea Lion (Zalophus californianus) Can Keep the Beat: Motor Entrainment to Rhythmic Auditory Stimuli in a Non Vocal Mimic" include Margaret Wilson and Colleen Reichmuth.

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Hip-hop musician will.i.am's "Reach for the Stars" officially became the first song broadcast from Mars today, thanks to a signal beamed from NASA's Curiosity rover.

"This is the first time that a song's ever come from another planet," Leland Melvin, NASA's associate administrator for education and a former astronaut, told students at an educational event at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.

On one level, the song's airing at JPL was as much of an audio and photo op as Monday's broadcast of a statement from NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, which represented "the first human voice broadcast from Mars." But on another level, the blend of space exploration and pop culture fueled the already-high interest in Curiosity's $2.5 billion mission on Mars.

"Mars has always fascinated us, and the things Curiosity tells us about it will help us learn about whether or not life was possible there, and what future human explorers can expect," Bolden said in a NASA statement. "Will.i.am has provided the first song on our playlist of Mars exploration." 

Inspiring the next generation
The event was also aimed at inspiring the next generation of explorers, engineers and scientists: Among the listeners in the JPL audience were students from Boyle Heights — the L.A. suburb where will.i.am, one of the stars of the Black Eyed Peas, grew up.

"I'm a little nervous, because my mom's in the audience," will.i.am joked. He said he wanted to inspire the kids in his old neighborhood "so that you guys don't ever think about leaving it, but changing it."

Believe it or not, this isn't the first time people tried to have a song broadcast from Mars. The European Space Agency arranged for its Beagle 2 lander to transmit a tune recorded by the British rock group Blur as the first signal confirming that spacecraft's safe landing in 2003. Unfortunately, that lander went out of contact during its descent and was never heard from again.

This time, the experiment worked.

Well after Curiosity's successful landing on Aug. 5, "Reach for the Stars" was uploaded to the rover's onboard computer and then transmitted back to NASA's Deep Space Network antennas on Earth. Flight director Bobak Ferdowsi, who has achieved Internet fame in his own right as "NASA Mohawk Guy," cued up the four-minute audio clip at the appointed time today. The rover wasn't broadcasting in real time: There's currently a nearly 15-minute communication gap for Curiosity's communications, due to the time it takes radio signals to travel the roughly 166 million miles (267 million kilometers) between Earth and Mars.

How the song got started
Will.i.am said the Mars Curiosity project had its genesis in "i.am.FIRST," an ABC-TV special on robotics and science education that he helped fund for broadcast last year. As a result of the success of that program, Bolden asked will.i.am to become involved in NASA's educational outreach program, and in response, the musician asked whether the space agency had anything special coming up.

"He said, 'We have a rocket going to Mars,'" will.i.am recalled. "So I said, 'Hey, have you ever thought about putting a song on the rocket, so when the rocket lands, the song comes back to Earth?' That's never happened before. So he said, 'Who's gonna do the song?' I said, 'Are you serious? Damn!'"

The musician said he intentionally went with an orchestral sound (with a 40-piece ensemble) instead of the usual hip-hop or dance beat. "I didn't want to do a song that was done on a computer," he said. "I wanted to show human collaboration ... and something that would be timeless, and translated in different cultures."

Will.i.am said the point of the song wasn't just about spaceflight.

"It's a reminder that anything is possible if you discipline yourself, and dedicate yourself and stand for something," he said. "Every single person that's a part of NASA stood for something, and we have this wonderful technology — the phone you have in your hand, and small computers. If it wasn't for their discipline and their relentless research and efforts, we wouldn't have these small computers. We don't have to just end up in the 'hood. But it's a hard thing. The hardest thing is discipline. Everything else is easy."

During today's event, the musician's i.am angel Foundation and Discovery Education announced a $10 million classroom education initiative focusing on STEAM themes (science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics). NASA said the Discovery Education initiative will incorporate content from the space agency and space exploration themes as part of its curriculum. The initiative will aim to reach 25 million students annually.

Lyrics for 'Reach for the Stars,' courtesy of KillerHipHop.com

Why they say the sky is the limit
When I’ve seen the footprints on the moon
Why do they say the sky is the limit
When I’ve seen the footprints on the moon
And I know the sky might be high
But baby it ain’t really that high
And I know that Mars might be far
But baby it ain’t really that far
Let’s reach for the stars

Reach for the stars
Let’s reach for the stars
Reach for the stars
Let’s reach for the stars
Reach for the stars
Let’s reach for the stars

(Let, let, let, let me see your hands up)
(Let me see your hands up)

Can’t nobody hold us back
They can’t hold us down
They can’t keep us trapped
Tie us to the ground
Told your people that
We don’t mess around
When we turn it up
Please don’t turn us down
We will turn it up
Louder than we were before
Like the lion out the jungle, you can hear us roar
When I lie in here, it’s like a sonic blaster
Flying just like NASA, out of space master

Hands up, reach for the sky
Hands up, get ‘em up high
Hands up, if you really feel alive
Live it up, live it up

Why they say the sky is the limit
When I’ve seen the footprints on the moon
Why do they say the sky is the limit
When I’ve seen the footprints on the moon
And I know the sky might be high
But baby it ain’t really that high
And I know that Mars might be far
But baby it ain’t really that far
Let’s reach for the stars

Reach for the stars
Let’s reach for the stars
Reach for the stars
Let’s reach for the stars
Reach for the stars
Let’s reach for the stars

Extra credit: So what's the first song broadcast from the moon? Could it really be "I Was Strolling on the Moon One Day," performed live by Harrison Schmitt and Gene Cernan in 1972?

More about the Curiosity mission:

• Rover sends first human voice from Mars
• Martian peak picks up some extra color
• Curiosity finds Mars 'teeming with UFOs'
• Cosmic Log archive for the Mars mission

Alan Boyle is NBCNews.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. To keep up with Cosmic Log as well as NBCNews.com's other stories about science and space, sign up for the Tech & Science newsletter, delivered to your email in-box every weekday. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Researchers have created a system that converts hand gestures into speech, and yes, into song as well. Although the system isn't yet ready for a shot at "American Idol," its name — Digital Ventriloquized Actor, or DiVA — gives you an idea where the technology is going.

"It is a singing synthesizer," said Sidney Fels, director of the University of British Columbia's Media and Graphics Interdisciplinary Center, or MAGIC. Fels explained how DiVA does its thing today in Vancouver at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

With the gestures of the right hand, DiVA's operator controls the pitch and the character of the sounds. Closed-hand gestures produce consonants. Open-hand gestures produce vowels. Meanwhile, the left hand is hooked up with finger contacts to create stop sounds like and buh. "We designed a gestural space that mimics the vocal tract," Fels explained.

The result is eerie: In the video above, you'll see a singer accompanying herself with the DiVA's voice. (I'm not ready to put it on my playlist just yet.) And in a series of videos, DiVA operator Sageev Oore synthetically sings the alphabet song and recites Dr. Seuss' "Green Eggs and Ham" verse as if he were playing two characters. (Which is kind of like Gollum talking to himself in the "Lord of the Rings" movies.)

If DiVA goes commercial, it could provide a new way for people with speech disabilities to make themselves heard. But why go to all that trouble when there are other speech synthesizers out there, including the electronic voice made famous by physicist Stephen Hawking?

"The problem with that is, you won't be able to sing. You won't be able to be expressive," Fels said.

One of the intended applications for the technology is to create new types of singing musical instruments that can be played in real time. Fels said there have been five compositions written for DiVA so far, played by musicians trained to use the device. "It takes about 100 hours for a performer to learn how to speak and use the system," Fels said in a news release.

The gloves, the volume-control foot pedals, the magnetic-sensor system and other components that bring DiVA to life can get rather unwieldy. "It's a backpack full of equipment," Fels told journalists. "I wouldn't walk around the restaurant and order sushi with it." But Fels and his MAGIC team are developing a version that can be operated with a computer tablet.

That hints at what may be more important applications in the longer run. The DiVA project got started as a way to teach people how to control a complex system with gestures and give them auditory feedback to let them know when they're doing the gestures right.

"Other possible applications for this discovery are interfaces to make certain tasks easier, such as controlling cranes or other heavy machinery," Fels said. It's also conceivable that gesture-based training might offer an alternative way to learn and practice foreign languages, particularly Asian dialects that depend on precise tonal control.

Gesture-controlled input devices ranging from Nintendo's Wii and Microsoft's Kinect have already revolutionized the gaming industry. Will DiVA, or other devices like it, open up a whole new frontier for the field? Does the future belong to gestures? Feel free to weigh in with your comments below.

More about gesture-controlled devices:

• Game device adapted for a robot's touch
• Control the cosmos with your fingers
• Hack lets game device read sign language
• Will your next smartphone recognize gestures?

More from the AAAS meeting in Vancouver:

• Researchers working to build a better leaf
• Answers ahead for physics' deepest mysteries
• Scientists revive sounds of Stonehenge and other sacred spaces
• Gas-drilling gaffes aren't unique to fracking, study says 

Since I mentioned Kinect, I should note that msnbc.com is a joint venture involving Microsoft as well as NBC Universal.

Alan Boyle is science editor at msnbc.com. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding the Cosmic Log Google+ page to your circles. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Frazer Harrison / Getty Images file

Jay-Z and Beyonce strut their stuff during a performance at the 2006 BET Awards. The couple, who just had a baby girl last week, are reportedly talking about doing a music video together in space.

Record executives are reportedly talking about sending Jay-Z and Beyonce into space to make a music video — and although Virgin Galactic's executives aren't yet in on the discussions, they say the pop-music power couple are welcome to take a ride. They can even bring their celebrity daughter along.

The idea came to light on Thursday in The Sun, a British tabloid that specializes in the exploits of the rich and famous.

"The label people have been talking about making a music vldeo in space," The Sun's Harry Haydon quoted a source as saying. "Beyonce and Jay-Z seemed the obvious option. Everything is being done to make it happen."

Executives are reportedly inquiring behind the scenes about making the video on Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo rocket plane. Scenes for the video would be shot during the few minutes of weightlessness that come at the peak of the suborbital space ride, more than 62 miles (100 kilometers) above Earth's surface.

SpaceShipTwo isn't due to start commercial service until the end of this year at the earliest, which is probably a good thing, because I'm guessing that Jay-Z and Beyonce have their hands full right now with Blue Ivy Carter, their newborn daughter. Blue Ivy has already hit the Billboard music charts, and eventually she might hit the heights of outer space as well.

"We're having no talks with Beyonce and/or Jay-Z (or indeed Blue Ivy!) but would be more than happy to take mum and dad or the whole family to space at some point!" Stephen Attenborough, Virgin Galactic's commercial director, told me in an email today.

Celebrities lining up
Beyonce is already known to have a soft spot for space: She recorded a special audio message for the crew of Atlantis during last summer's final space mission. "You inspire us all of us to dare to live our dreams, to know that we're smart enough and strong enough to achieve them," she told the astronauts.

If the project comes together, Jay-Z and Beyonce could make the first professional music video performed in outer space. But they wouldn't be the only celebrities in space. The glitterati rumored to be on the list of prospective Virgin Galactic passengers include Katy Perry and Russell Brand (who recently broke up), Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, Paris Hilton, Tom Hanks and Victoria Principal.

Then there's Stephen Hawking, the superstar quadriplegic physicist who just turned 70. Hawking took a zero-gravity airplane flight five years ago and is still up for a Virgin Galactic spaceflight. Attenborough said that Virgin Galactic's founder, British billionaire Richard Branson, "was delighted to attend his 70th birthday celebrations last weekend and reiterated Virgin Galactic's commitment to do everything possible make it happen."

No freebies for the stars
SpaceShipTwo is designed to carry just six passengers and two pilots — which means celebrities can bring a small entourage along with them. Hawking would reportedly ride for free, but other celebs shouldn't expect freebies: The cost of a space travel package is $200,000 per seat, and Branson said last year that he wouldn't be offering any special deals.

"I'm in the airline business, and a lot of people ask for upgrades, and we're not going to get the same thing happening with our space program," he told The Canadian Press.

So when might the tourist treks to space begin? Attenborough didn't mention an exact date in his email, but he said "2012 is going to be the most exciting year yet."

"We are poised on the edge of the final stretch of flight testing, with the commencement of SpaceShipTwo powered tests expected in the not-too-distant near future and ramping up, if all goes well, to space flight within the 12-month period," he said. "Clearly we will also require the FAA licences before we embark on passenger flights, but are continuing to see a major gear-up in the Spaceport America-based operation in preparation for that."

Virgin Galactic has more than 450 would-be spacefliers signed up, and Attenborough said "we are continuing to see near-record growth in the numbers of future astronauts."

"I expect in the early part of this year we will have more paid-up customers than have been to space to date — which will be an exciting milestone," he said.

More about Beyonce and Jay-Z:

• 'Bootylicious' fly named after Beyonce
• Slideshow: Beyonce, a star at last
• Beyonce baby complaints at hospital dismissed
• Jay-Z raps about baby, mentions miscarriage

More about Virgin Galactic:

• Planning the next steps in a new space race
• New Mexico's desert spaceport makes a splash
• Slideshow: The making of SpaceShipTwo
• Gallery: Ten players in the commercial space race
• Cosmic Log archive on the new space race

Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter and adding the Cosmic Log page to your Google+ presence. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Scientists have figured out how male hummingbirds serenade the ladies. And it doesn't necessarily involve humming a tune.

In this week's issue of the journal Science, Yale University biologist Chris Clark and his colleagues reveal that the birds can make their tails flutter at set frequencies as the dive toward the females for an aerial display. Different species of hummers make their own signature sounds, which are dependent on how the tail feathers interact with each other. Other factors, such as the size, shape, weight and stiffness of the feathers, contribute to the variations in tone.

"The sounds that hummingbird feathers can make are more varied than I expected," Clark said in a National Science Foundation feature article on the research.

The high-speed courtship dives give the males a chance to show off their shimmery feathers and their aerobatic prowess. But what's the purpose behind the tail-flapping? Clark suggests that the loudness of the buzz may serve as a proxy for a male's fitness, and therefore his suitability as a mate.

Some hummingbirds flutter their tail features to make a sound almost identical to its vocal courtship song. In fact, Clark theorizes that the vocal sound may have evolved from the tail sound.

Clark measured the flutter of the feathers using a scanning laser doppler vibrometer, and analyzed high-speed videos of the tail feathers of hummingbirds in a wind tunnel.

"This work is an excellent example of the use of physical approaches to understand the function of biological structures, and it reveals aerodynamic — rather than vocalized — signaling during courtship," said the NSF's William Zamer. "It is significant that the diversity of feather structures in these hummingbirds may result from sexual selection."

But is there any practical application to this work? Well, maybe so. Clark notes that airplane wings can also flutter as air flows over them, and if they're not engineered just right, they could even break due to all that fluttering. In contrast, hummingbird feathers are built to bend rather than break. Engineers just might be able to learn a thing or two from dive-bombing birds.

If you want to learn more, check out the NSF online feature, this posting on the Dot Earth blog, this one from Not Exactly Rocket Science, this ScienceNOW report ... and, of course, the tuneful video above.

More songs of the animal kingdom:

• Gibbons sing with different accents
• Ultrasonic love songs drive female mice wild
• In a noisy world, birds are changing their tune
• Tiny insect makes loud noise ... with its genitals

In addition to Clark, authors of the Science paper, "Aeroelastic Flutter Produces Hummingbird Feather Songs," include Damian Elias and Richard Prum.

Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding me to your Google+ circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds. 

Daniel Maurer / AP

This 35,000-year-old bird-bone flute, held by the University of Tübingen's Nicholas Conard, is considered one of the world's oldest handcrafted musical instruments. But researchers say human musicmaking has much more ancient roots.

If you think about, there's no escape, really. Music holds humanity in a vise grip. Every culture you can think of has it, hears it and taps their feet to it. So how did music first take hold? A new analysis proposes that music hijacked our ancestors' ability to hear and interpret the movements of fellow human beings.

That claim is at the heart of “Harnessed: How Language and Music Mimicked Nature and Transformed Ape to Man,” a new book by neurobiologist Mark Changizi. Changizi analyzed the rises and falls in the rhythm and intonation of more than 10,000 samples of folk music from Finland and found that they bear a stamp — an auditory fossil of sorts — that can be traced back to the rises and falls and rhythms associated with the movement of people. 

It’s the latest in a series of theories that have drawn upon evolutionary biology, developmental biology, psychology and neuroscience to explain how human beings came to cultivate music as a complex, expressive craft. Music has persisted in society, but it doesn't seem to come with any obvious survival benefit. If it wasn't essential to survival, why did it stick around? 

BenBella Books

"Harnessed," a new book by neurobiologist Mark Changizi, focuses on the origins of music - and how music helped shape humanity.

“Music really is the story about a person moving or doing something around you,” Changizi told me. “It’s just like listening to a story. We’re having an auditory story about people moving our midst.” 

The appreciation for music grew and developed from this primal urge, monopolizing a natural faculty meant for human survival. Music essentially “harnessed” this urge, Changizi says, which also explains the title of the book.

“A lot of thinking is remote from the physical act of making music,” William Benson, a jazz musician and author of the book "Beethoven’s Anvil," told me. “And [Changizi] gets right to the physical aspect of making music.”

For one thing, it explains music's emotional appeal. In his book, Changizi described a study that looked at the foot patterns of people in different emotional states. When they were happy, sad or angry, their gaits betrayed their feelings.

“Music may not be marching orders from our commander, but it can sometimes cue our emotional system so precisely that we feel almost compelled to march in lockstep with music’s fictional mover,” Changizi writes. “And this is true whether we are adults or toddlers. When music is effective at getting us to mimic the movement it mimics, we call it dance music, be it a Strauss waltz or a Grateful Dead flail.”

The relationship between movement and music may come as a surprise for some, but not so much for others. In some African cultures, the word for "music" and "dance" are one and the same. In contrast, concert pianists or cellists sit still when they perform. 

Why this difference? Blame the Gregorian chant, says Benson. Monasteries were the intellectual centers of Europe in the Middle Ages. Monks chanted tonal, arrhythmic verses daily, developed the Western musical notation, and set the pattern for the understanding and performance of Western music during the centuries that followed. “And if you think of that as the basis for music, then you’re not going to get the kind of music you get in Africa and India,” Benson told me.

Essentially, the Gregorian chant decoupled the ideas of movement and rhythm from music in the Western world. But Changizi's theory brings the ideas together once again, backed by a statistical approach that looks more deeply into the correlation between dance and movement and music. 

Take a deeper look into the brain, and you may have an even more convincing case for music being an intrinsic characteristic of the human experience, says Edward Large, who studies how the brain processes sound and rhythm. While Changizi's musical analysis sounds reasonable, there may be an even deeper universality. "The paydirt is where you find the same patters in the brain that you find in the music," he told me.

So, the human brain was harnessed. A faculty that came into being for survival — recognizing the behavioral patterns in the movements of others — was tweaked, and music hitched a ride into the lives of modern humans.

We see such behavior all the time, Changizi explains. Just look at cats: “Although tuna is not what cat ancestors ate, tuna is sufficiently meat-ish in odor and taste that it fits right into a cat’s finicky diet disposition.” And music, it seems, is tuna for our finicky brains.

More about the science of music: 

• Making music from weather data
• Music of spheres and the stars
• The geometry of music
• Music made for monkeys
• Music for cavemen
• The sounds of science

Nidhi Subbaraman writes about science and technology for everyone. Find her on Twitter and Google+ and join our conversation on Facebook. 

Nathalie Miebach

This wall piece, "The Perfect Storm," reflects weather data from the twin storms of 1990 that sank a fishing vessel off the coast of Massachusetts - and inspired a book and movie that were also titled "The Perfect Storm." Click through a slideshow featuring Miebach's musical scores and sculptures.

Nathalie Miebach decides what storms sound like.

This Boston artist spends her studio time turning reams of weather data — wind speeds, barometric readings and rainfall totals — into music and sculptures. 

Miebach's work has tracked temperate storms, documented the daily weather of beaches. In one particularly poignant project, she created a musical piece that documented changes in weather during the week following her father-in-law's death. For her work, Miebach was selected as a 2011 TEDGlobal Fellow. 

Origins
It began when Miebach signed up for astronomy night classes at Harvard, while taking basket weaving lessons from a local artist during the day. "I was going to the lecture with my bucket and sprayer," Miebach said, "[I was] learning about astronomy ... about the deepest of space, and the deepest of time, but all I really got was a two-dimensional understanding of it all." 

But then something clicked: Miebach found herself thinking, "I could really use the basket to find a tactile way of understanding astronomy." 

Miebach's final project wove her daytime and nighttime pursuits neatly together. She made a basket which described an astronomical chart — the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram, which astronomers use to classify stars.

Miebach was hooked. "When you take data and put it into 3-D, things get revealed that don’t get seen in a normal graph," said the artist, who spent six years after her Harvard course working on art inspired by data from the stars.

And then one day, she got a call from two weather scientists at Tufts University. They'd gotten wind of her work, and asked her to spend a summer collecting weather data on a lonely patch of Massachusetts coast on Cape Cod.

The Cape Cod experience rerouted her attention to weather data, which she then started using as the raw material for her artistic work. To create the pieces she makes now, she uses a combination of data she collects by herself, from wind vanes and temperature gauges, as well as data available off the Internet: temperature and wind speed, measured over the course of days, weeks, or months.

Where the music happens
The musical bits coming out of Miebach's projects really started out as a happy accident, when she realized that what she understood as a graph of data could be re-interpreted by musicians. 

Miebach wasn't an expert herself. "I don’t know anything about music – I don’t play music and I can’t read music," she acknowledged. But she found musicians such as Janet Schiff, a Milwaukee cellist, who were willing to help her convert numbers on graph paper to music that musicians could understand. "That was my challenge," Schiff told me.

"My No. 1 rule is that I don't touch the data," she said. The numbers get laid out on a graph. The graph is then embellished with things that Miebach saw, like the cloud cover, or the moon cycles. "A D on a piano keyboard might be a 5-mile-an-hour wind," Miebach said.

During a series of exchanges with the musicians, the notations are reworked, polished, and refined so that they make musical sense. The music ends up sounding a little like this, or this. Both of these are recordings of Miebach's "Hurricane Noel," which was made from weather data that tracked a storm's path along North America's east coast, all the way from Haiti to Nova Scotia. (The audio files are large, so give them a while to open.)

Miebach encourages the musicians who play her work — such as Janet Schiff and her colleagues in the Nineteen Thirteen Trio, or the Axis Ensemble — to personalize the work, as long as they keep the data intact. That's why the two recordings sound different.

Nathalie Miebach

The musical score for "Hurricane Noel" incorporates weather data from a storm that swept through North America's east coast over the course of three and a half days in 2007. Click through a slideshow featuring Miebach's musical scores and sculptures.

Artistry and awkwardness
It isn't until the score is perfected and packed away that Miebach begins sculpting. She picks one or two elements of the swirling data before her, and begins building, looping in layer after layer, creating wall mounts as well as woven sculptures.

The final products, arresting visuals with loud weaves and bright colors, at first glance look like something out of a kid's store, Miebach admits, but that's what draws people in.

"Only when they have their nose in the sculpture, that’s when they realize that this is all numbers. That behind all this playful presentation is a system of logic that puts it all together," she said. 

At that moment, there's an "awkward tension" that develops between the viewer and her piece, Miebach said, as they realize that what they're looking at could fit snugly in an art gallery, in a science museum and in a craft show. This awkward art appreciation is just what Miebach is looking for.

More about turning science into art: 

• Music of the genes
• Music of the spheres … and the stars
• The geometry of music
• Music made for monkeys

Click through a selection of Miebach's sculptures and musical scores.

Nidhi Subbaraman is the science and tech news intern at msnbc.com. Follow Nidhi on Twitter, and connect with the Cosmic Log on Facebook. 

"Sunrise Number 1" and "The Dreams You Give" have earned spots on the highest-flying music program in existence: NASA's wakeup music for the crew of the space shuttle Endeavour.

These tunes aren't Billboard mega-sellers ... yet. They're original songs that were entered over the past few months in the space agency's "Space Rock" contest. More than 1.5 million votes were registered. "Sunrise Number 1" by the group Stormy Mondays garnered almost half of those votes. "The Dreams You Give," performed by Brian Plunkett and his family, came in second.

Their reward? "Dreams You Give" will be played for Endeavour's crew at 6:56 p.m. ET on May 30, and "Sunrise Number 1" will air at 5:56 p.m. ET on May 31 to kick off the astronauts' last scheduled workday in space. Those may sound like ungodly hours for wakeup music, but that's just because of the mission's topsy-turvy, graveyard-shift schedule.

The latest contest follows up on an earlier poll for previously recorded hits. This time around, the entries had to be original works, composed around a spaceflight theme and submitted by the authors. Both of the top songs are bouncy, good-time tunes well-suited to get the astronauts out of their zero-G sleeping bags.

Stormy Mondays' lyrics declare that "we don't care 'bout rain or shine, when you're in space the weather's fine." The Plunkett kids tell the astronauts, "Thank you for showing us the journey from the pillow fort to the shuttle bay." Not a bad way to wake up ...

More on space music:

• Shuttle Discovery gets a 'Star Trek' send-off
• Wake up like an astronaut
• A heroic space flute duet
• Space flutist hits high note

You can connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page or following @b0yle on Twitter. And for something completely different, check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for new worlds.

Ever since the Apollo era, NASA has been beaming up tunes to start off the workday for traveling astronauts. For the last mission of the space shuttle Discovery, the space agency asked the public to pick a couple of fitting wakeup songs from its Top 40 list. More than 2.4 million votes were registered in the online contest, and the winners are "Blue Sky" by Big Head Todd and the Monsters (with 722,662 votes) and the "Star Trek" theme song by Alexander Courage (with 671,134 votes). Songsters have also submitted more than 1,300 original compositions for consideration as future wakeup songs.

Thanks to the marvels of the Internet, you too can wake up like an astronaut. Just arrange to have your Mission Control team click the "play" button and crank up the volume.

There'll be another online vote for the wakeup tunes to be played during Endeavour's STS-134 swan song in April. Stay tuned...

Join the Cosmic Log community by clicking the "like" button on our Facebook page or by following msnbc.com science editor Alan Boyle as b0yle on Twitter. To learn more about Alan Boyle's book on Pluto and the search for planets, check out the website for "The Case for Pluto."