Whales have songs, and so do birds, of course. But does music lift the spirits of a swallow? Do humpbacks hum to make themselves mellow?
Although bird songs and many other animal vocalizations have been the subject of intense scientific study, the effect of music on the moods of creatures other than humans has remained mysterious. If anything, research has suggested that animals are indifferent to human music, whether it’s a sonata, a ballad or a rocker.
But a provocative new study, spawned by an unusual partnership between a cellist with the National Symphony Orchestra and a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, has provided some of the first evidence that humans are not the only species whose heartstrings are pulled by music.
“We’ve basically shown for the first time that the components of music that seem to be important in affecting us emotionally are also the same components that affect other species,” said Charles T. Snowden, the Wisconsin psychologist who teamed up with David Teie of the National Symphony Orchestra.
Snowden has spent years studying a diminutive species of monkey known as the cotton-top tamarin. These tamarins live in the rainforests of Central and South America and are known for their highly complex and frequent vocalizations.
“They use a lot of sounds in their natural communications system,” Snowden said. “They were a natural species to study something like this.”
Teie, who also teaches music at the University of Maryland in College Park, contacted Snowden in the hopes of exploring his ideas about the emotional effects of music. He thinks music has roots in the most primitive, earliest sounds to reach our ears, such as a mother’s heartbeat.
After studying Snowden’s extensive catalog of recordings of tamarin calls and spending a couple of days in Madison making his own recordings of the primates, Teie set out to compose music tailored to the tamarins.
“My idea was, there’s no reason for Barber’s ‘Adagio for Strings’ to bring tears to the eyes of a tamarin,” Teie said. “So I made a special kind of music just for them.”
Teie modeled his compositions on two types of calls — one that the monkeys emit as alarms and another that they produce when they are safe and calm. He created two songs designed to be agitating like a heavy-metal song and two designed to be calming like a ballad, using the standard structures of human music but utilizing the rising or falling pitches and durations of sounds in the monkey calls.
After recording the songs with his cello, Teie speeded them up eightfold to match the tempo and frequency of monkey vocalizations.
“They are tiny little creatures, and everything moves very fast when they chirp to each other,” Teie said. “So I sped it up eight times so it would make sense to them.”
Snowden and his colleagues played the 30-second song snippets for seven pairs of tamarins and conducted detailed observations of how they behaved for the next five minutes. The scientists compared that behavior to how the animals acted after hearing two ballads — the “Adagio for Strings” and a mellow song by Nine Inch Nails called “The Fragile,” as well as two aggressive songs: “Of Wolf and Man” by Metallica and “The Grudge” by Tool.
As expected, the human songs had no apparent effect on the monkeys’ behavior or emotions. In contrast, after hearing the tamarin compositions designed to elicit anxiety, the monkeys clearly displayed more signs of that emotion, such as looking around, sticking out their tongues and shaking their heads. Similarly, they showed clear signs of calming down — slowing down their activities, eating, etc. — after hearing the ballads Teie composed for them.
“The human music had virtually no effect on them,” said Snowden, whose findings were published in the Sept. 1 issue of the journal Biology Letters. “But the tamarin songs had clear effects.”
Teie said he was thrilled by the findings.
“I can pretty confidently say that before this, there were no controlled studies showing a response to music by an animal,” he said. “So this is the first.”
The findings indicate that the human proclivity for music has a long evolutionary history, Snowden said.
“The results are suggestive to us that the emotional parts of music may have a long evolutionary history,” he said. “The emotional aspects of music may apply to many other species as well, and in order to find that out we need to consider each species’ frequency range or structure or tempo.”
Bird songs and whale songs are generally considered more like a system of communication than a way of affecting emotions, Snowden said.
“The function of the bird song is primarily in courtship and mate attraction. It’s done only in one sex — males — and stops after an animal secures a female. It has structure and variability and complexity, but it’s used in a different context. It’s used to influence mate attraction, not to influence any emotional state,” Snowden said.
Other researchers said the findings are intriguing.
“I think it is a very creative approach to a deeply interesting question: How does organized, complex sound affect the emotions of animals?” said W. Tecumseh Fitch, a professor of neurobiology and cognition at the University of Vienna. “The authors are correct that the proper way to study the question is to create stimuli suited to the species being tested, in pitch and tempo, rather than simply playing Mozart, Metallica or other human music to them.”
But Fitch said the findings are hard to interpret.
“There are so many variables changing that it is difficult to know which ones are actually having an effect,” he wrote in an e-mail. “It will take a lot of careful work with carefully controlled stimuli to know what, exactly, is causing the change in the monkey’s behavior.”
Teie has already tried the approach with cats. While those compositions have yet to be subjected to a stringent scientific test like Snowden’s, informal feedback from a handful of cat owners has been intriguing, he said.
“Some people have said, ‘My cat has never been so calm,’” Teie said.
He said he has been in touch with officials at the National Zoo, who have expressed interest in compositions designed for other primates.
“I’d like to start up a program to bring music to all captive mammals,” Teie said. “It can be calming, but also exciting for animals in a cage with nothing to do. The enjoyment of music should be available to all mammalian species.”
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