The quickSilver staff is headed out this weekend to the All Points West music festival.\u00a0 Our plan is to dance around like monkeys.<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s why:\u00a0 researchers at the University of Kyushu Japan have reported that chimpanzees, like humans, have an innate appreciation of music.\u00a0 Using an orphaned chimp named Sakura – who had never before heard music of any kind \u2013 as a test subject, researchers played two sets of music.\u00a0 The first set was two short pieces of German classical music, with all the notes played correctly.\u00a0 The second set was the same pieces, but with all the G notes altered to G-flats and the C notes to C-flats.\u00a0 Sakura was given a string which she could pull to repeat any of the music that she heard.\u00a0 Across numerous sessions, Sakura consistently pulled the string more often to repeat \u201cconsonant\u201d pieces versus \u201cdissonant\u201d pieces.<\/p>\n
This is the first evidence that music appreciation exists beyond humans.\u00a0 Multiple studies have shown that all humans, regardless of cultural background, have a consistent recognition of musical patterns.\u00a0 But animals just didn\u2019t seem to get it.\u00a0 Birds can tell the difference between different song sequences, but they show no preference for one over the other.\u00a0 And research with other types of primates has not uncovered any musical appreciation.\u00a0 We\u2019ve long suspected that music soothes the savage beast, but Sakura is the first non-human to offer any proof.<\/p>\n
We think more research is needed.\u00a0 If animals can understand human music, we wondered how well do humans understand music about animals?\u00a0 So at All Points West, our plan is to listen carefully when Coldplay rocks out on \u201cAnimals,\u201d MGMT plays \u201cOf Moons, Birds and Monsters,\u201d and Echo and the Bunnymen offer up \u201cBring on the Dancing Horses.\u201d\u00a0 We\u2019ll watch how human beings respond to these pieces.\u00a0 We\u2019ll jump in there and dance around ourselves, to see if we can deduce anything significant.\u00a0 We\u2019ll take careful notes and let you know.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s not that we\u2019ll enjoy this, you understand.\u00a0 We\u2019re doing this for science.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The quickSilver staff is headed out this weekend to the All Points West music festival.\u00a0 Our plan is to dance around like monkeys. Here\u2019s why:\u00a0 researchers at the University of Kyushu Japan have reported that chimpanzees, like humans, have an innate appreciation of music.\u00a0 Using an orphaned chimp named Sakura…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[55,316,429,847],"class_list":["post-93","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-4","tag-animals","tag-dancing","tag-festival","tag-music"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=93"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=93"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=93"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=93"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}