From Gary O:
Harvard and MIT researchers have finally addressed a question that has long been puzzling mankind: "If you were a New World monkey, would you rather listen to Russian lullabies or German techno?" In the September issue of Cognition, Josh McDermott and Marc Hauser report finding that both cotton-top tamarins and common marmosets clearly prefer the lullabies. A follow-up experiment concludes that the monkeys actually prefer silence over Russian and German lullabies, as well as Mozart.
Of course no primates (including humans) enjoy listening to Gary Yodel. Here's Gary at Big Bend National Park testing the echoes with his wonderful yodeling talent:
And finally...here's the abstract from Pubmed:
Cognition. 2007 Sep;104(3):654-68. Epub 2006 Aug 28.
Nonhuman primates prefer slow tempos but dislike music overall.
McDermott J, Hauser MD.
Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT, Perceptual Science Group, NE20-444, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.Human adults generally find fast tempos more arousing than slow tempos, with tempo frequently manipulated in music to alter tension and emotion. We used a previously published method [McDermott, J., & Hauser, M. (2004). Are consonant intervals music to their ears? Spontaneous acoustic preferences in a nonhuman primate. Cognition, 94(2), B11-B21] to test cotton-top tamarins and common marmosets, two new-World primates, for their spontaneous responses to stimuli that varied systematically with respect to tempo. Across several experiments, we found that both tamarins and marmosets preferred slow tempos to fast. It is possible that the observed preferences were due to arousal, and that this effect is homologous to the human response to tempo. In other respects, however, these two monkey species showed striking differences compared to humans. Specifically, when presented with a choice between slow tempo musical stimuli, including lullabies, and silence, tamarins and marmosets preferred silence whereas humans, when similarly tested, preferred music. Thus despite the possibility of homologous mechanisms for tempo perception in human and nonhuman primates, there appear to be motivational ties to music that are uniquely human.