David Teie is a cellist in the National Symphony Orchestra

I have spent a lot of time during the past few years leading my perfectly reasonable wife, Pavla, to think that I have lost my marbles. I have been given to extended periods of time sitting in my chair looking like a dozing cellist, only to pop up mumbling and sketch something into my little book or log onto an internet search. I was putting together ideas pertaining to how music affects the emotions. After two years of that and another year of writing a book on the subject I started writing music for monkeys. Pavla stayed with me, nevertheless.

I sent the book to Charles T. Snowdon (at the University of Wisconsin – Madison) in January of 2007 and proposed that we test the effect of species-specific music on members of the colony of cotton-topped tamarin monkeys he had there at the time. If my ideas were right, I surmised that I could compose tamarin music based on tamarin development and vocalizations. In April I flew out to Madison to record the tamarin calls and lay the groundwork for the testing. I stayed with Chuck and Ann in their beautiful home and spent a couple of days recording hours of tamarin vocalizations. They are literally jumpy monkeys – it is a part of their natural defenses that they are constantly hopping around and chirping to each other – moving targets.

In the tests we played aggressive human music (Metallica), ballad human music (Barber Adagio), aggressive tamarin music, and ballad tamarin music for them. Basically, they had little or no reaction to human music and significant and appropriate reactions to the tamarin music, they were anxious following the playing of the tamarin aggressive music and were calmed by the tamarin ballad. We replicated the test using different human and tamarin music and got the same results again. BOOOOYAAAH!!! Can I say that? I had done a little preliminary test of tamarin music during my visit in April and got such a strong reaction from the little critters that I did a celebration dance in the lab office. I don't think they get a lot of that there…

We submitted the paper to two other journals before being accepted by the highly prestigious Biology Letters. Mind you, we are delighted with the journal that took the paper! Biology Letters is published by the Royal Society, the world's oldest scientific society – these are the guys who invented the peer review system. It is great to be published by Charles Darwin's crowd.

For those interested in the theory and the study, David Teie will post another blog that will be divided it into sections to allow for skimming/skipping: 1) an outline of the basic ideas behind his theory of music, 2) a description of the study, and 3) some possibilities for the future of species-specific music. The story has now been carried by: NPR, The Washington Post, the Discovery Channel, and other major news outlets around the world.