The quickSilver staff is headed out this weekend to the All Points West music festival. Our plan is to dance around like monkeys.
Here’s why: researchers at the University of Kyushu Japan have reported that chimpanzees, like humans, have an innate appreciation of music. Using an orphaned chimp named Sakura – who had never before heard music of any kind – as a test subject, researchers played two sets of music. The first set was two short pieces of German classical music, with all the notes played correctly. The second set was the same pieces, but with all the G notes altered to G-flats and the C notes to C-flats. Sakura was given a string which she could pull to repeat any of the music that she heard. Across numerous sessions, Sakura consistently pulled the string more often to repeat “consonant” pieces versus “dissonant” pieces.
This is the first evidence that music appreciation exists beyond humans. Multiple studies have shown that all humans, regardless of cultural background, have a consistent recognition of musical patterns. But animals just didn’t seem to get it. Birds can tell the difference between different song sequences, but they show no preference for one over the other. And research with other types of primates has not uncovered any musical appreciation. We’ve long suspected that music soothes the savage beast, but Sakura is the first non-human to offer any proof.
We think more research is needed. If animals can understand human music, we wondered how well do humans understand music about animals? So at All Points West, our plan is to listen carefully when Coldplay rocks out on “Animals,” MGMT plays “Of Moons, Birds and Monsters,” and Echo and the Bunnymen offer up “Bring on the Dancing Horses.” We’ll watch how human beings respond to these pieces. We’ll jump in there and dance around ourselves, to see if we can deduce anything significant. We’ll take careful notes and let you know.
It’s not that we’ll enjoy this, you understand. We’re doing this for science.
the quick Sliver 