When people play their funky music for cotton-top tamarins, the monkeys hardly get their groove on. But playing monkey music does the trick. Cello music that mimics tamarin calls seems to bring forth the same sort of emotions in the monkeys that the original calls would have elicited, researchers report online September 1 in Biology Letters.
People from many different cultures respond similarly to certain musical characteristics, such as inflection and pitch, says coauthor Charles Snowdon of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “But we shouldn’t expect other species to process it in the same way.” He and coauthor David Teie of the University of Maryland School of Music in College Park wanted to know whether monkeys’ emotional states could be manipulated by music the way people’s emotions are.