The story contains what I'm pretty sure is my favorite quote from the paper since I've worked here.

“I may be just a schmo to you,” he says, “but, man, to monkeys I am Elvis.”

From the press release for the Evert Young/Seth Payne Award for young science journalists:

The judges also awarded an Honorable Mention to Sadie Dingfelder for what they called a “wonderful” tale of a cellist who develops and successfully tests novel ideas about the evolution and effects of music. The story, entitled “Play that Monkey Music,” appeared in the Washington City Paper. The judges commended the story for using vivid characters and a compelling narrative to illuminate the often surprising twists and turns in the pathways and processes of science.

The $1,000 prize went to Amber Dance for four stories in the Los Angeles Times, Nature, and Nature Medicine.

Working on a universal field theory of music centered on the notion that all human compositions are rooted in sounds we hear in the womb, Teie began creating music for monkeys, Sadie Dingfelder reports in our Arts in Review issue. She writes:

Confirming his initial hunch, he found that relaxed tamarins tend to use notes in the diatonic scale—which would sound melodious to ancient Chinese court musicians as well as any modern blues guitarist. He also found that calm calls used high, pure notes, like a flute, but threatening sounds tended to be low, harsh, and dissonant. That observation dovetailed with research Teie found showing that the amygdala, a structure in monkey and human brain stems, responds strongly to dissonance. Curiously, it sends our heart racing when we hear the harsh-sounding intervals that 20th century composers are known for.

“Why should the amgydala care about dissonance? It’s not as if Arnold Schoenberg was running around in tents 30,000 years ago, killing people,” Teie says.

Read the full profile here.

If you want to mellow out a monkey, play him some Metallica.

That's the surprising result of a new study by Charles Snowdon, a
University of Wisconsin-Madison psychology professor. The researchers played clips of music— including Metallica's
"Of Wolf and Man," Nine Inch Nails', "The Fragile," Tool's "The
Grudge," and Barber's "Adagio for Strings"—for cotton-top tamarins.

Humans generally find the Nine Inch Nails and Barber pieces to be calming, with their slow tempos and descending pitches, like sighs. The Tool and Metallica songs, in contrast, tend to make people feel excited, as a result of their faster tempos and machine-gun bursts of
notes.

The monkeys, however, barely responded to any of the pieces, though they did seem to calm down and relax a bit while listening to Metallica and Tool.

"I don’t have a good explanation for that," says Snowdon. "They are usually very active animals, and their movement got minimal after they heard those two pieces."

The practical upshot? Monkey keepers may want to play heavy metal rather than classical music to calm their colonies. However, they'd do even better if they played "monkey music" — pieces composed specifically for tamarins by study co-author David Teie, a University of Maryland cello instructor and member of the National Symphony Orchestra.

Teie mimicked the contours of tamarin calls and wrote songs that had a muchbigger effect on the animals' behavior than human music did. One piece, with a slowly rising whistle-like melody, caused the monkeys to groom one another and engage in other leisurely, social activities. Another, with short, staccato notes, sent the animals into a frenzy of anxious behavior including scent marking and head shaking.