16 August 2009

The babbling marmoset

Pretty random this one, but pleasing enough to share:
Vocal play (in the form of babbling) does not appear to be unique to humans. Elowson et al. note that this behaviour occurs in juvenile pygmy marmosets, that response from a caregiving adult is more likely when the juvenile is vocalising, and suggest that pygmy marmoset babbling has relevance to understanding the evolutionary processes of human vocal development.
-- from The Evolution of Music: Theories, Definitions and the Nature of the Evidence by Ian Cross and Iain Morley (2002)

But this is the opposite of pleasing:

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