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It also helps for an animal to know the volume of these awhoos as it is a good proxy for closeness, and therefore danger. It's even a good thing to know the rhythm of these awhoos as it helps again to assess if these wolves, or wolf, is on the move while awhooing or on the move between awhoos.
And this is just one example I'm currently making up bit at least makes sense that for many animals: tempo, volume, rhythm, patterns in sound, it's needed for survival. So evolution will select for it.
Music is a lot more than just those things I think, but it at least shows some evolutionary backbone as to why I believe that more animals have been evolved to like music. At least, some elephants sure seem to enjoy a good piano [1].
One possible reason is that allowing one’s nervous system to be entrained to external rhythms is potentially exploitable. So humans may have evolved the ability to “let the guard down.”
Another thing that comes to mind is recent pop-sci talking about how individual bees can measure time pretty accurately, which I personally found very surprising, even though I've heard that they "dance" for communication.
Rhythm appreciation is neurologically very interesting since it requires several basic abilities acting at once, including tracking time, but also a certain amount of memory and pattern recognition. Animal appreciation of melodic stuff and harmony is interesting too but seems much harder to study and more dependent on physical aspects of ears
We have a time window within which audio stimulae are interpreted as being "the same sound". When you hear two impulses outside that window, they seem to be different sounds. You can play with this by looping two similar or copies of a sound and then varying their offset a few ms either way. They'll move in and out of seeming like the same and different sounds, and around the crossover point you get ringing effects (especially if there's more than two copies, such as with tight echoes).
To me, this seems like a fundamental part of music interpretation. Not the core, but very significant.
Also, different species have different time perceptions. (I mean, I'm kinda guessing, but they all have different heart rate ranges, attention spans, brain wave frequency ranges etc, all of which imply to me a varience in time perception). Our music makes sense against our time perception; we're quite sensitive to it... raise the bmp of a track by just 2 or 3 and it feels quite different. Change from 50% swing to 53% (or 52 if you're really sensitive) and your sense of the groove changes meaningfully. Pass all that through the "different perception of time" and it's easy to imagine our music means nothing to other species.
It also seems likely to me that:
a) most species have different sized windows
b) they perceive blends of frequencies quite differently depending on the window length
So, what seems like coherent, organised sound with a "story" or "meaning" or "structure" to us, probably becomes mush to most other species.
Then note that the different frequency ranges in which animals hear, the different ways their ears focus sound... etc. Us humans are creating organised sound around the biology of our auditory system; the perception of organisation is likely very different for most other species.
Just the difference between boom and bap, boom ... bap... boom... bap... tells us "something". but it's gonna tell you something different if you hear it as ttppssssss daaaaapppp ttpppssssss ddaaappppp.
Music is a hack.
Edit: and... songbirds exist.
Interesting choice of example. Dog howls are apparently intentionally off-key.
The goal of the basic choir is to sound like one voice in perfect harmony.
The goal of a pack howling over long distances is apparently to communicate that every member of the pack is present - so each voice is out of harmony with the rest.
That's what people write in the sheet music, but reality is more complicated than that. Notably in swung rhythms ratios are blurry (and dependent on BPM) and specific performers in band will play different ratios at the same time (e.g. drummer will play straighter, soloist will swing more).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euclidean_rhythm
If I understand it right, Toussaint's 2005 paper showed that many common rhythms across world music can be generated by distributing beats as evenly as possible. Some of the patterns in this newer research are Euclidean, but the broader finding is that people have a natural affinity for small-integer-ratio rhythms generally. So this is empirical evidence of why these mathematically simple patterns (including Euclidean rhythms) show up across world music.
Integer ratios are the base upon which harmony is built. Temperament is a subtle modification that sounds very close to integer ratios, but allows more complex harmonic structures where dissonance is evenly spread out across all the relationships between tones.
That said, we're trying to isolate things that are typically not isolated. If you get to 7/4 by following the harmonic series, it will sound in-tune. If you get to 16/9 by playing and applying 4/3 twice, then that will sound in tune. Unsurprisingly the second option is more common in music.
That's another simplification, real pianos are not tuned to 12TET, but use stretch tuning (which can be over 30cents off in the lower range).
I'd rather argue that people like what they're used to and so "people like pure ratios" is seemingly only true if "pure ratios" are not really pure. And that's ignoring a lot of the music that doesn't have roots in Europe.