Volume 15 Number 2 November 2009
It is 300 years since William Congreve wrote: ‘Music hath charms to soothe the savage breast’, but it is a sentiment that we all share. We all know intuitively that some types of music make us feel calmer, others set our pulses racing and yet others make us emotional. Music is evidently one of the surest ways to influence emotions, but is this purely a human characteristic? Monkeys care little for human music, but play them some of their own ‘tunes’ and it is a different matter. When psychologist Charles Snowdon and cellist David Teie collaborated to compose music based on the pitch, tone and tempo of tamarin monkey calls, they found that what they produced significantly affected the behaviour and emotional responses of these monkeys.
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