I've got another EP in the works, though no date fixed for its release yet. I might have a bit more to say about that, but first up some crazy information about music for monkeys. Researchers have discovered that monkeys don't much like music for humans - and this has led to music custom-composed for, and approved by, monkeys. It's all in this article from Wired by Hadley Leggett . Adds a bit of weight to Wittgenstein's line "If a lion could talk, we wouldn't be able to understand it".
I liked this news. For one thing, it's music and monkeys! Also, I hope it's a bit of a knock to the various universalist theories underlying notions like Mozart-for-babies. If you want a basis for a universal theory of music, I prefer the idea that you try to get out from under people's very localised notions about what constitutes proper "form". Studying other species is one way to get a little perspective, to dissociate ourselves from our music-saturated life-experience.
(Another way is to study humans whose brains process music in ways that are different to the norm - Oliver Sacks' book Musicophilia offers a completely different take on what music may actually do to you than what you'd get from, say, Stanley Crouch).
I like the idea that we may be feeding animals "the wrong music" just like "the wrong food" (as when dog-food manufacturers emphasise that their food is extra chunky, even though dogs prefer mush, because humans like chunky food) (although the chunky food may be better for them, their teeth and their colons, but that's a digression too far...)
One thing in this article that's not emphasised enough is that the monkeys in question are tamarins (like the one in the photo), tamarin being a genus of new-world monkey. It's important to note the genus, because old-world monkeys are less closely related to new-world monkeys than they are to humans ("monkey" is a staggeringly loose term). Even if tamarins prefer tamarin-music to human-music, there's no reason why a macaque would find either palatable, and it might complain at having its tastes lumped in with those tamarins (not that we'd be able to understand it - see Wittgenstein above...)
Of course, there's no reason why taste shouldn't cross the species barrier. I quite like the "happy monkey music" extract (even if I don't "get" the happy part of it), and the tamarins are reportedly okay with Metallica.
(Thanks to Janet who drew my attention to the article. The WIttgenstein quote is on p.235 of Philosophical Investigations (4th edition, trans. Anscombe, Hacker and Schulte). There's more information about Sacks' Musicophilia at musicophilia.com - it's worth a look...)