There is a (now rather dated) theory of an hierarchy of arts, where music, being the most abstract and at the same time the most intimate and sensual (AKA spiritual) one taking the crown. If you adhere to this idea to some degree, there may be no way around this kind of conclusion, short of abandoning said theory, since music is supposed to encompass the virtues of all the other arts.
There is very little similarity between music and the sounds made by a songbird.
According to an article I read about a scientific paper on the subject, I think, birdsong doesn't have particular notes belonging to a particular scale in the way that nearly all human music does. I can actually hear a cuckoo as I type this ... perhaps it's trying to present a counter-argument? ... but I'm not convinced! and I'm not going to record it and measure the frequencies of the two "notes" ... however, I've just looked it up and apparently the interval starts off as roughly a minor third in the spring and gradually changes into roughly a perfect fourth in the summer! You can incorporate that sound into music -- it's been done lots of times -- but the sound itself isn't music and most music isn't imitative like that.
This is a strange and limiting definition of music, and rather unfair to the birds.
Jokingly, when I sing, it is also hard to tie the sounds coming out of my mouth to particular notes....
seriously, there are birds who sing in a choir/band; the lead singer is the only one who gets laid, his friends "only" help him to sound his best and to give social support to his efforts to impress. Point is a very dedicated effort for a group of animals to coordinate soundmaking as a form of social communication to arouse emotion and bonding. How is this not music?
I've seen people write code in languages that don't even have types, like most computer languages do. Obviously they are not programming. That's right, hard-coding in assembler or even strict binary/hex is as far from programming as you can get!
I suppose it's a bit like the question of whether non-human animals have "language": they do, in a sense, but it's rather different from human language.
To me music is not spiritual (whatever that means - I'll have to copy analog31's comment: "I think I'm an intelligent person, but I also don't think I'm spiritual in any way that I'm aware of.
And I can play the flute."
