The Call of the Wild: Discrimination of Music and Monkey Calls in Cotton-Top Tamarin Monkeys

Multiple theories for the evolution of music have been proposed, one of which asserts a connection between music and language. Tests of the auditory perception capabilities of nonhuman primates have revealed certain abilities to discriminate between stimuli based on sound quality, pitch, and melody and have also revealed sensitivity to different types of music. This suggests that some aspects of human music perception abilities may be shared with nonhuman primates, potentially indicating evolutionary origins of those abilities in a common ancestor. This study investigates auditory perception in cotton-top tamarins in response to both call stimuli and artificial music stimuli, allowing for a direct comparison of „language‟ and „music‟ perception in a nonhuman primate in an attempt to examine the music-language theory of music evolution. The tamarins‟ responses to manipulations of a habituated call stimulus differed from manipulations of a habituated music stimulus, but some octave generalization occurred in both conditions. Calls were generalized to be similar when raised an octave and music was generalized to be similar when lowered an octave. This evidence argues for certain shared neural resources for the processing of language and music in tamarins, although there may be some specialization in the mechanism for the processing of calls which is not utilized during processing of music stimuli.