As someone who has an interest in both music and psychology, I was interested to read an article in a recent Drum Media magazine (a free music magazine based in Sydney). You can check out a couple of write-ups for the study here or here. It appears that some research has been done into the effect that music has on monkeys. It seems that there is only one piece of music that does anything - there may be more, but they might not have checked these. They compared music written specifically based on the calls of the cotton-top tamarin with music written by a range of human composers. The list that they tried out is as follows.
Of Wolf and Man - Metallica
The Grudge - Tool
Adagio for Strings - Samuel Barber
an excerpt from The Fragile - Nine Inch Nails
Metallica reportedly calmed them down.
Apparently they are going to rethink animal husbandry guidelines based on the study. Animal husbandry might not be the issue, the issue might be with the so called common ancestor (still yet to be found since the Indonesian pygmys dubbed Hobbit or Piltdown Man). The only thing that the study has really shown is that monkeys and humans don't think in the same way. Yes the test was far from conclusive (according to what any Yr 7 Science student could tell you, you need a larger test sample) but there was a fair range of music chosen from Metallica's thrash metal style to Tool's almost progressive or heavier trance (in this song) style, all the way to string orchestra with Samuel Barber. With only 1 eliciting any response, statistically, there is almost no 'human' music that they react to and those that they do respond to, they respond to completely differently - I have yet to find anyone who has been relaxed by Metallica.
Just a thought.
Of Wolf and Man - Metallica
The Grudge - Tool
Adagio for Strings - Samuel Barber
an excerpt from The Fragile - Nine Inch Nails
Metallica reportedly calmed them down.
Apparently they are going to rethink animal husbandry guidelines based on the study. Animal husbandry might not be the issue, the issue might be with the so called common ancestor (still yet to be found since the Indonesian pygmys dubbed Hobbit or Piltdown Man). The only thing that the study has really shown is that monkeys and humans don't think in the same way. Yes the test was far from conclusive (according to what any Yr 7 Science student could tell you, you need a larger test sample) but there was a fair range of music chosen from Metallica's thrash metal style to Tool's almost progressive or heavier trance (in this song) style, all the way to string orchestra with Samuel Barber. With only 1 eliciting any response, statistically, there is almost no 'human' music that they react to and those that they do respond to, they respond to completely differently - I have yet to find anyone who has been relaxed by Metallica.
Just a thought.
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