Music Notation

Music notation graphs display long, detailed records of social interaction in an easily seen, visual form. This technique can help researchers see patterns in interaction that are not available with other methods. It can help observers think about and form hypotheses concerning interaction in human and animal groups.

The particular music notation graph below shows the aggressive interactions over six hours in a group of four hens forming a dominance hierarchy. The horizontal lines represent the hens by their eventual rank in the hierarchy. Arrows indicate aggressive acts from one hen to another. The arrows are in the color of the initiator of the act and go from her line to the line of the receiver. The time in minutes and hours since the group was introduced is indicated above each block of the graph. Rather than time since a group started, a graph can also show the number of interactions occurring in a group since the start of observation.

Take a look at the animation for boxing chickens below. It illustrates how music notation graphs work. For more detailed information on the uses of the music notation technique, see this article.

Music notation can be adapted to illustrate other kinds of interactions beside aggressive ones in groups of humans or animals.

In the future, we will have an interactive program on this website that will let researchers use their own data to make music notation graphs.