{"id":357686,"date":"2021-10-25T18:00:03","date_gmt":"2021-10-25T15:00:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/looking-for-musical-abilities-in-primates\/"},"modified":"2021-10-25T18:00:03","modified_gmt":"2021-10-25T15:00:03","slug":"looking-for-musical-abilities-in-primates","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/looking-for-musical-abilities-in-primates\/","title":{"rendered":"#Looking for musical abilities in primates"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#Looking for musical abilities in primates<\/strong>”<\/p>\n

\n
\n
\n
\"That
\n Indri songs recorded in the wild have rhythmic categories similar to those found in human music. Credit: Filippo Carugati
\n <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Songbirds share the human sense of rhythm, but it is a rare trait in non-human mammals. An international research team led by senior investigators Marco Gamba from the University of Turin and MPI’s Andrea Ravignani set out to look for musical abilities in primates. “There is longstanding interest in understanding how human musicality evolved, but musicality is not restricted to humans,” says Ravignani. “Looking for musical features in other species allows us to build an ‘evolutionary tree’ of musical traits, and understand how rhythm capacities originated and evolved in humans.”<\/p>\n


\n <\/section>\n

To find out whether non-human mammals have a sense of rhythm, the team decided to study one of the few ‘singing’ primates, the critically endangered lemur Indri indri. The researchers wanted to know whether indri songs have categorical rhythm, a ‘rhythmic universal’ found across human musical cultures. Rhythm is categorical when intervals between sounds have exactly the same duration (1:1 rhythm) or doubled duration (1:2 rhythm). This type of rhythm makes a song easily recognizable, even if it is sung at different speeds. Would indri songs show this “uniquely human” rhythm?<\/p>\n

Ritardando in the rainforest<\/b><\/p>\n

Over a period of 12 years, the researchers from Turin visited the rainforest of Madagascar to collaborate with a local primate study group. The investigators recorded songs from twenty indri groups (39 animals), living in their natural habitat. Members of an indri family group tend to sing together in harmonized duets and choruses. The team found that indri songs had the classic rhythmic categories (both 1:1 and 1:2), as well as the typical ‘ritardando’ or slowing down found in several musical traditions. Male and female songs had a different tempo but showed the same rhythm.<\/p>\n