The study has been a first

Nov 30, 2009 08:01 GMT  ·  By

Humans are known to be one of the few species in the world today that can appreciate art, artificial constructs that play on our capacity to idealize and understand abstract things. Music is at the forefront of this ability. While there are those of us who cannot comprehend the art behind a certain painting, music generally appeals to everyone. Researchers have been curious as to when we learned to enjoy music over the course of our evolution, so they tested our primate cousins for knowledge. While capuchin monkeys proved to be unable to understand music, chimpanzees showed a lot more capacity.

In a recent, first-of-its-kind study, scientists played a number of tunes to chimpanzees, which are closely related to us, humans, in terms of genetic material at least. For some reason, until now only research on other primates had been conducted, in terms of analyzing the origin of music. The most difficult thing that the science team involved in the experiments had to do with discovering an animal that had not been previously exposed to music. This is a lot more difficult than it may seem, because, nowadays, we love music to such an extent that we blast it everywhere.

One such animal, a female chimp named Sakura, was discovered in a zoo after being rejected by her mother. The chimp was just 17 weeks old at the time, and was reared entirely away from radios, TVs, CD players and other music sources. In the experiments, scientist Kazuhide Hashiya, of the Kyushu University, in Fukuoka, Japan, graduate student Tasuko Sugimoto, and several other colleagues gave Sakura a string, which controlled a musical device. The team played classical minuets, some correctly, others with notes made to sound out of tune. For instance, they used a software to replace all the G notes with G flat ones.

Sakura could pull on the chord and make the minuets be played again. She did so mostly on the ones that featured the correct notes. According to the science team, in 55 percent of the instances, the consonant version of the melody was chosen, as opposed to the modified one. Details of the amazing research appear in the latest issue of the journal Primates, LiveScience reports. The researchers say that the study hints at a common origin between humans and chimpanzees, as far as the brain circuits that allow us to understand music go.