DJ finds out baby Zebrafish 'groove' to MC Hammer hit song

Being a 90s baby or 90s kid and wearing this fact on the sleeve is all in vogue. Well yeah, the decade was unique. Although the majority of millennials can't get enough of 90s music, 90s life and whatnot, something that happened bang at the start of the decade may not always be remembered by the young crowd.

But one such song has come in news.You Can't Touch This by MC Hammer. You can hear the song in this story. Yeah, the beat is quite familiar. So not really a forgotten gem.

But the song has hit headlines again after a DJ found that baby Zebrafish groove to this.

Enter DJ Rebecca Poulsen aka BeXta, Australia's first female dance music producer.

After hundreds of gigs around the globe, Poulsen continues to churn out funky scores and tracks. But she is even studying Neuroscience at University of Queensland. And guess what, she found that baby Zebrafish had a reaction to the MC Hammer hit song. Neurons in Zebrafish's brains fired up at a particular vocal by MC Hammer.

Can #zebrafish encode the unique properties of sound? Like pure tones vs white noise, or different shaped waveforms? Our new #preprint from @labEthan says yes! Check out our example with @McHammer! Can you find the vocal neurons? #auditory #phdLife #HammerTime 1/ pic.twitter.com/8hYIUBDjBW — BeXta (@djBeXta) September 22, 2020

What perhaps makes this unique is that Poulsen tried subjecting the Zebrafish to White Noise and as per her tweet, the fish had a different reaction to music than they exhibited only for White Noise.

"...These results suggest a more nuanced auditory system than has previously been described in larval fish and provide insights into how a young animal’s auditory system can both function acutely and serve as the scaffold for a more complex adult system," she says in her research paper published in Current Biology.

To put it strictly, Poulsen did not base her research on MC Hammer song. She studied how their brain reacted to simpler sounds with help of a laser scan

But then, she thought of You Can't Touch This and got special, small speakers so that noise from bigger speakers did not put the Zecrafish larvae in danger.

And voila! Their brains had a different reaction

Poulsen tagged MC Hammer himself in her tweet. The artist was amused and even replied back

Sparking thoughts !!! 💥💥💥pic.twitter.com/krs0zL1xWo https://t.co/0lPZ1YEg4U — MC HAMMER (@MCHammer) March 4, 2021

When does a sound become music? Can animals discern between different types of music?

The answer may lie in this research, who knows?