It’s official – Metallica is monkey music. That’s the conclusion reached by a group of scientists who set out to discover how human music came into existence.

And while the cotton-top tamarins ignored tracks by Nine Inch Nails and Tool, they responded positively to Metallica’s 1991 Black Album track Of Wolf and Man.

Chuck Snowdon of the University of Wisconsin believes music was invented by copying sounds we connected with emotions, so soft music was created from happy noises while powerful music came out of angry or busy sounds.

He tells The Guardian: “The emotional components of music and animal calls might be similar. We’re finding the note patterns and timings are important for communicating moods in animals and people.”

The tamarin experiment involved playing different types of music to see if monkeys respond to music, or if only humans do. They played a variety of 30-second clips including music experts had devised from monkey sounds.

While they reacted to the monkey music, the only human music they paid attention to was Metallica’s – and it made them calm and relaxed rather than the response straight-laced lab geeks expected.

Snowdon added: “You can’t expect another species to be interested in our music just because we’re human. Why should a tamarin find our music comforting? I find the monkey music quite irritating.”

He didn’t say what he made of Metallica.

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