Monkey music

It is generally assumed that music, especially its emotional or affective components, has played an important role in human evolution. The music like component of language, prosody, is central in the "motherese" sounds made to calm human infants. Non-human primates, however, are almost completely indifferent to the sounds of human music. Now Chuck Snowdon here at Wisconsin has collaborated with musician David Teie in an interesting bit of work that demonstrates that cotton-top tamarin monkeys respond to 'tamarin music' synthesized from their affective vocalization sounds. Some interesting samples of the music are here, and here is the abstract of their work, which suggests that affective components in human music may have evolutionary origins in the structure of calls of non-human animals:

Theories of music evolution agree that human music has an affective influence on listeners. Tests of non-humans provided little evidence of preferences for human music. However, prosodic features of speech (‘motherese’) influence affective behaviour of non-verbal infants as well as domestic animals, suggesting that features of music can influence the behaviour of non-human species. We incorporated acoustical characteristics of tamarin affiliation vocalizations and tamarin threat vocalizations into corresponding pieces of music. We compared music composed for tamarins with that composed for humans. Tamarins were generally indifferent to playbacks of human music, but responded with increased arousal to tamarin threat vocalization based music, and with decreased activity and increased calm behaviour to tamarin affective vocalization based music. Affective components in human music may have evolutionary origins in the structure of calls of non-human animals. In addition, animal signals may have evolved to manage the behaviour of listeners by influencing their affective state.