Composer Emily Doolittle was born in Nova Scotia (Canada), and educated at Dalhousie University, Indiana University, the Koninklijk Conservatorium (the Hague) and Princeton. Her doctoral dissertation Other Species' Counterpoint: An Investigation of the Relationship between Human Music and Animal Songs (Princeton, 2007) examines the question of whether we can consider some animal songs to be music in the same sense as human music. She currently lives in Montreal, and has written for such ensembles as Orchestre Métropolitain du Grand Montréal, Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra and Ensemble Contemporain de Montréal.