chimpanzees go Ape for Indian and African music!

 

Chimpanzees like to listen to music - but have very specific tastes, researchers have found.

While preferring silence to music from the West, chimpanzees like to listen to the different rhythms of music from Africa and India, researchers found.

The research is the first to discover primates have a preference for music, according to the American Psychological Association, which published the study.

The researchers admit they made the discovery by mistake, said study coauthor Frans de Waal, PhD, of Emory University.

'Our objective was not to find a preference for different cultures' music,' she said.

 

'We used cultural music from Africa, India and Japan to pinpoint specific acoustic properties.

'Past research has focused only on Western music and has not addressed the very different acoustic features of non-Western music. 

While nonhuman primates have previously indicated a preference among music choices, they have consistently chosen silence over the types of music previously tested.

Previous research has found that some nonhuman primates prefer slower tempos, but the current findings may be the first to show that they display a preference for particular rhythmic patterns, according to the study. 

'Although Western music, such as pop, blues and classical, sound different to the casual listener, they all follow the same musical and acoustic patterns. 

'Therefore, by testing only different Western music, previous research has essentially replicated itself,' the authors wrote. 

The study was published in APA's Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Learning and Cognition.

When African and Indian music was played near their large outdoor enclosures, the chimps spent significantly more time in areas where they could best hear the music. 

When Japanese music was played, they were more likely to be found in spots where it was more difficult or impossible to hear the music. 

The African and Indian music in the experiment had extreme ratios of strong to weak beats, whereas the Japanese music had regular strong beats, which is also typical of Western music.

'Chimpanzees may perceive the strong, predictable rhythmic patterns as threatening, as chimpanzee dominance displays commonly incorporate repeated rhythmic sounds such as stomping, clapping and banging objects,' said de Waal.

'Chimpanzees displaying a preference for music over silence is compelling evidence that our shared evolutionary histories may include favoring sounds outside of both humans' and chimpanzees' immediate survival cues,' said lead author Morgan Mingle, BA, of Emory and Southwestern University in Austin. 

'Our study highlights the importance of sampling across the gamut of human music to potentially identify features that could have a shared evolutionary root.'