In this talk, I consider the history of animal musicality in the early modern period. Throughout the eighteenth century, natural philosophers considered the effect of music on different nonhuman animals; one example is Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, who pondered whether animals like sheep are “sensible to the pleasures of music.” Most famously, a concert was staged at the end of the century for two elephants at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris. In my talk I will go over the ways in which eighteenth-century naturalists and musicians approached animal hearing as a means to understand what it means to listen to music. I will pay special attention to the significance of experiments that include performances of music in front of animals and the broader infrastructures and networks that many of these experiments relied upon.