Chimps prefer Indian, African rhythms instead of Western: Study

A new research has revealed that chimpanzees favor listening to music from Africa and India with different beats rather than Western music.

Frans de Waal, PhD said that their objective was not to find a preference for different cultures' music but they used cultural music from Africa, India and Japan to pinpoint specific acoustic properties.

He further explained that chimpanzees might perceive the strong, predictable rhythmic patterns as threatening, as chimpanzee dominance displays commonly incorporate repeated rhythmic sounds such as stomping, clapping and banging objects.

Previous research has found that some nonhuman primates prefer slower tempos, but the current findings may be the first to show that they display a preference for particular rhythmic patterns.

When African and Indian music was played near their large outdoor enclosures, the chimps spent significantly more time in areas where they could best hear the music. When Japanese music was played, they were more likely to be found in spots where it was more difficult or impossible to hear the music.

The African and Indian music in the experiment had extreme ratios of strong to weak beats, whereas the Japanese music had regular strong beats, which is also typical of Western music.

Morgan Mingle, BA, of Emory and Southwestern University in Austin said that chimpanzees displaying a preference for music over silence is compelling evidence that the shared evolutionary histories may include favoring sounds outside of both humans' and chimpanzees' immediate survival cues.

The research is published by the American Psychological Association.