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Chimpanzees prefer African and India music to Western music, according to a new study.

In fact, chimps prefer silence to music fro the west, according to scientists from Emory University.

"Our objective was not to find a preference for different cultures' music. We used cultural music from Africa, India and Japan to pinpoint specific acoustic properties," study co-author Frans de Waal, PhD, of Emory University, said in a news release. "Past research has focused only on Western music and has not addressed the very different acoustic features of non-Western music. While nonhuman primates have previously indicated a preference among music choices, they have consistently chosen silence over the types of music previously tested."

Researchers said the latest study is the first to suggest that nonhuman primates enjoy listening specific rhythmic patterns.

"Although Western music, such as pop, blues and classical, sound different to the casual listener, they all follow the same musical and acoustic patterns. Therefore, by testing only different Western music, previous research has essentially replicated itself," researchers wrote in the study.

Researchers found that chimps were spent significantly more time in areas where they could best hear music when researchers played African and Indian music. However, Japanese music had the opposite effect.

Researchers explain that African and Indian music are similar in that they both possess extreme ratios of strong to weak beats. However, Japanese music, which is more similar to Western music, contained regular strong beats.

"Chimpanzees may perceive the strong, predictable rhythmic patterns as threatening, as chimpanzee dominance displays commonly incorporate repeated rhythmic sounds such as stomping, clapping and banging objects," said de Waal.

"Chimpanzees displaying a preference for music over silence is compelling evidence that our shared evolutionary histories may include favoring sounds outside of both humans' and chimpanzees' immediate survival cues," lead researcher Morgan Mingle, BA, of Emory and Southwestern University in Austin, said in a statement. "Our study highlights the importance of sampling across the gamut of human music to potentially identify features that could have a shared evolutionary root."

The findings were published in APA's Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Learning and Cognition.