[podcast]https://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/upLoads//2009/09/Monkey-Music.mp3[/podcast]
I’ve written more than once about science related to music, but every time it’s been about human music. It’s never occurred to me to write a column about monkey music.
Until now, that is. Now, University of Wisconsin-Madison psychology professor Charles Snowdon and National Symphony Orchestra cellist David Teie have decided to delve into this hitherto little-investigated field of study, recently publishing their results in the Royal Society Biology Letters.
Although psychologists at the University of Leicester, U.K., have previously found that dairy cows produce more milk when they listen to relaxing music (Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony and Simon and Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water, to name two), most studies have found that animals in general, including our closest relatives, the non-human primates, prefer silence to that infernal racket we humans like to fill our ears with. (“You two-legged weirdoes! Turn down that noise! And get off my lawn!”)
But that’s not really surprising, considering, as Teie, a lecturer in the School of Music at the University of Maryland, put it in an interview with Discovery News, “Music is a human construct designed for humans…everything about human music is based on human development and perception.”
Or, more colorfully, “Did we really think that bats would get little tears flowing up their little faces when listening to the Ave Maria?”
Curious about animal responses to music, Teie contacted Snowdon, asking him if he had ever investigated the effects of music on monkeys. Snowdon (who is also a musician, having sung in choirs all his life) was intrigued by the idea, and so together he and Teie set out to see if they could create a kind of music that would elicit emotional responses in monkeys, just as human music does in us.
That rather daunting compositional task fell to Teie. He began by listening to recordings Snowdon had made of the calls of cotton-top tamarins, and was able to discern as he did so which calls were from animals that were upset, and which were from animals that were more relaxed.
He then composed music using specific features he had noticed in the monkeys’ calls. For example, upset monkeys mix sharp, staccato sounds with longer noises that trend upward in pitch. Relaxed monkeys, on the other hand, make longer-lasting calls that fall in pitch.
Teie created one piece of monkey music that used staccato percussive noises and short, high-pitched screeches, and another that contained long, pure, tones using familiar musical scales.
When they played the music back to seven pairs of adult cotton-top tamarins at the University of Wisconsin, the monkeys became more anxious and jittery while listening to the fearful monkey music, but then calmed down upon hearing the friendlier music.
Snowdon says this has echoes in human behavior, pointing out that it’s reflected in “baby talk”: we use long, legato tones to calm babies, and staccato tones to order them to stop. When we approve of something they do, we use a rising tone, and when we’re soothing them we use a decreasing tone. “The voice, the intonation pattern, the musicality can matter more than the words.”
This is one of the first studies to show that a non-human animal can truly appreciate music, albeit not human music. Snowdon believes it also points to the origin of music in human beings. “We think that the emotional communication part of music has an early history that predates humans,” he told Discovery News. “If music based on tamarin calls can alter their behavior, then our ancestors would have been able to use similar components of music to influence one another, and perhaps simple words to name things or to express actions.”
Teie was intrigued by the results to the point that he’s hoping to follow up with a species-specific music project at the National Zoo that would “create music for enrichment of captive animals.”
He’s already moved beyond monkeys to compose music for domestic cats, based on what’s known about their communication and hearing.
Oh, and the study at the University of Wisconsin also involved playing human music for the monkeys. Their only response to several samples?
Metallica calmed them down.
Proof enough that though tamarins may be our distant cousins, we’re not that closely related.
