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by Melinda Wenner
Igor Stravinsky once characterized his music as being "best understood
by children and animals."
Though some people might not agree with it, Stravinsky's claim
highlights an intriguing evolutionary question: Is our appreciation for
music innate? And, if so, would that appreciation be shared by our
evolutionary ancestors?
A new study slated for publication in the
journal Cognition reports
that our ancestors may not, in fact, be audiophiles. Non-human
primates appear to prefer silence to music, suggesting that musical
appreciation may be uniquely human.
"We're really in the first stages of looking into these things," said
Josh McDermott, a perceptual scientist at MIT and coauthor of the
study. "But everything we've done suggests fairly striking differences
in the way that humans hear music and the way that animals do."
McDermott and Harvard evolutionary psychologist Marc D. Hauser found in
earlier studies that tamarin and marmoset monkeys have the ability to
discriminate between different types of music to the point of noticing
pieces written by different composers.
But to tease out whether monkeys actually "like" music, the scientists
set up a maze consisting of two equivalent paths with speakers at each
end. When a monkey was released into the maze, it could wander into one
side and hear a lullaby. On the other side, it heard silence.
Each of the four tamarins and five marmosets the scientists tested
spent significantly more time on the silent side of the maze,
suggesting that they preferred silence to music.
The researchers also studied whether the monkeys had preferences
between fast and slow-paced music by giving them a choice between a
Russian lullaby and German techno music. They preferred the lullaby.
This preference, Hauser predicts, may be because lullabies are known to
trigger more pleasant emotional responses. "The continuity of the
melody of a lullaby is something that is
designed to calm," he said, adding that preferences for slower tempos
"may have very ancient evolutionary roots."
Erin Hannon, a psychologist at Harvard who studies music perception,
disagrees.
"It is not clear from the literature that humans prefer slow to fast
tempos," she wrote in an email.
More research is needed to determine whether the preference non-human
primates appear to have is indicative of an evolutionarily conserved
trait, she added.
But Hannon does agree that the new research provides key information
about non-human primates that could help us to understand the origins
of music.
"These experiments clarify that the animals can in fact show
preferences in response to music," she wrote. "Yet, it also shows that
these animals just aren't generally very interested in music."
For his part, McDermott says it will be important to repeat the
experiment with smarter—and larger—primates, such as apes and
chimpanzees. He guesses that tamarins and marmosets, both very small,
may dislike music because it prevents them from hearing more
biologically relevant sounds.
"One of their dominant motivations is avoiding becoming a meal for
someone," he said. Larger animals may exhibit different preferences
simply because of
their size.
McDermott is also spearheading a global online study to determine
whether musical preferences are universal and therefore innate.
• Posted September
21, 2006 08:38 PM
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