When David Teie, a cellist with the National Symphony Orchestra, wanted to test his ideas about where our emotional response to music originates, he decided to try them out on monkeys. He figured that if his theories were right â?? namely, that our response to the “emotional vocalizations,” pulses and heartbeats that we first hear in the womb establishes our sense of music â?? then he should “be able to write music for another species thatâ??s effective for that species.” He contacted Charles Snowdon, a psychology professor who ran a colony of cotton-top tamarins in Madison at the University of Wisconsin, who sent him recordings of tamarin calls that demonstrated fear and calm.
Office of Strategic Communication