The Pet Sounds Connection

Clashes with convention are necessary steps for the evolution of any human discipline. Here, the standard form of scientific paper is being challenged by producing a paper written unorthodoxly, in the form of a poem. The tone and the message of the paper written in free verse are inspired by the 1966 pop record, Pet Sounds, specifically in terms of its taking on a quiet, introvert route in a corporate musical world demanding the kicks and the clamor of rock ‘n’ roll and related genres. The paper is divided into three parts, the first of which, written by the senior author, is introductory. It outlines the objective of the work and sets the mood for the rest. The second part portrays children’s play in an improvised pet house, by including the lines of their dialogue, rearranged into a poem by the senior author. The third part closes the circle, as it explicates the findings and concludes the study. The focus of the latter is on two children, a boy and a girl, aged 9 and 6, respectively, at play—with and without plush toys in their playroom. Experimentation involved measuring children’s happiness and degrees of liveliness and interactivity during play with and without the presence of 64 plush pets in their immediate environment. The parameters descriptive of happiness, liveliness, and interactivity were taken as proportional to the number of times children smiled, gestured, and made contact, whether physically, with their eyes, or through objects held in their hands, per the unit of time. The results demonstrate that the presence of pets makes children happier, more animated, and more interactive. Conforming to these observations, the content is centered around the idea that plush pets, as in Toy Story, must be alive, and with them, everything inanimate in our worlds, should it only be seen with the eye of the children’s hearts

Convention · Happiness · Interactivity · Musical · Poetry · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Human-Animal Interaction Studies · Themes in Literature Analysis