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Beastly beats
Beastly beats T
HE Remo drum company has provided kits for the Beatles, Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones. But the rock-and-roll antics of a recent group of clients is in a different league. “These guys will sit on a drum, they’ll pee on it, they’ll chew it, they’ll try to pick it apart with their fingers,” says Edward Large. “It really needs to be indestructible.” He’s not wrong. They trashed their first set of bongos within a week – and they hadn’t even played them. But then, they are bonobos. It wasn’t until the company came up with a more robust kit – made from the material used to upholster pick-up trucks – that the beat could start. Like most animals, bonobos don’t share our love of a beautiful melody or exquisite harmonies. But, in recent years, the rudiments of rhythm have been found in a surprisingly diverse menagerie. So Large, a psychologist at the University of Connecticut, wanted to find out whether bonobos would take to the drums. This wasn’t simply for fun. Understanding why some species can tap out a beat but others can’t could reveal the origin of music and shed light on our own journey to becoming the all-singing, all-dancing ape. Charles Darwin described music as our “most mysterious” faculty. He suggested
46 | NewScientist | 20/27 December 2014
it began with a “musical protolanguage” – a kind of vocal mating display akin to birdsong – that eventually diverged into two separate traits: speech and music. Others see music as “beneficial play” – prehistoric brain training that challenges various mental skills, such as memory and the perception of emotion. It has also been described as “auditory cheesecake”, a pleasurable experience that just happens to occur as the result of other mental traits we possess such as pattern recognition. Unfortunately, there has been little evidence to back up any of these ideas. Now a switch in focus to rhythm, rather than pitch and harmony, has changed all that. Researchers have found few universal patterns in the way different musical traditions combine pitches. But rhythm is different – while drumming may not be for everyone, dancing to some kind of beat occurs in almost all musical cultures. What’s more, unlike an understanding of harmony, a sense of rhythm seems to be innate. Play drum tracks to newborn babies whose skulls have been covered with electrodes, and there is a spike in neural activity when a drummer skips a beat, as if they have perceived the rhythm and noticed an error. All of which points to rhythm as one of our most primal musical traits.
GONÇALO VIANA
Which animals were born to dance? David Robson finds out
Even so, other animals weren’t thought to share our sense of rhythm. Aniruddh Patel, now at Tufts University in Massachusetts, was one of the first to question this notion. He suspected that complex communication set us on the path to music, reasoning that speech relies on the same connections between auditory and motor areas of the brain that produce rhythmic movement. Although no other species has language, some are capable of flexible, learned vocalisations. If Patel was right, these creatures – which include songbirds, cetaceans and parrots – should all have a sense of rhythm. In 2009, Patel saw the perfect opportunity to test the idea when a colleague emailed him a link to a YouTube sensation called Snowball. In the video, the sulphur-crested cockatoo could be seen rocking his body in time to the Backstreet Boys’ song Everybody (Backstreet’s Back). Patel emailed the bird’s owner, Irena Schulz, and together they showed that Snowball could also bob his head in time to versions of the song that had been accelerated or slowed down. Patel was delighted. “I saw it opening up a lot of future research,” he says.
“The bonobos trashed their first set of bongos within a week” And he was right. Soon, Adena Schachner and her colleagues at Harvard University were combing YouTube for more dancing animals. They found signs of rhythm in 14 other species capable of vocal learning, including macaws, parakeets and Asian elephants. A further 500 videos showed animals with limited vocalisation, such as dogs, ducks and owls, moving to music but failing to keep time, strengthening Patel’s hypothesis. But last year, the first notes of discord began to sound. First came Ronan, a young sea lion at the Long Marine Laboratory at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Sea lions aren’t thought to be vocal learners. However, after a year of training, Ronan could easily match Snowball in a dance-off. Besides bopping to Everybody, she shimmied her way through Earth, Wind and Fire’s Boogie > 20/27 December 2014 | NewScientist | 47
Wonderland – a more difficult task, given the many tempo changes within the song. Despite the challenges, it seemed to be her favourite tune. “With Everybody, she soon got irritated and quit,” says her trainer Peter Cook. “But when we gave her Boogie Wonderland she just hit it and didn’t get tired. She still loves it, to this day.”
Then primates got in on the act. Our closest relatives all have a very limited repertoire of calls. Nevertheless, in 2013, Japanese researchers reported that a chimp called Ai had learned to tap a keyboard in time to a simple backing track. And this February, Large announced exciting results from the bonobos at Jacksonville Zoo and Gardens in Florida. When Large set up his drum kit and began to jam in a walkway between the bonobo enclosures, he attracted an enthusiastic audience. “They came and sat around us to listen in silence. It was rapt attention, and when we stopped they all started screaming for more.” After some coaxing, two bonobos eventually started to drum along with researchers and, in tests around their preferred tempo – which reached a whopping 278 beats per minute – they kept to the beat in about 40 per cent of trials. What are we to make of these results? Patel isn’t giving up on his idea. The bulk of animals with a sense of rhythm are still vocal learners, he points out. The bonobos only synchronised with a single drumbeat, not complicated, multilayered music. He admits that Ronan’s dancing is intriguing, but argues that sea lions may be more loquacious than we realise given that there are very few studies of their vocalisation. Most other researchers suspect there is a spectrum of abilities – and that vocal learning may be only one of many factors that imbue some species with the ability to beat time. For instance, there may also be a link between a sense of rhythm and social behaviour – especially the need to coordinate actions. In other words, rhythm acts as a kind of social glue. Ronan’s grooves certainly seem to support this idea; sea lions often swim in packs to help them flush out their prey. 48 | NewScientist | 20/27 December 2014
Main: Steven Kazlowski/NPL/REX; left bottom: Jonathan Bird/Getty; left top: birdlovers only
Beat generation
Can you spot which one is the dad dancer?
Likewise, bonobos and chimps both live in relatively large groups that require individuals to evaluate and respond to the actions of others. Perhaps predicting the timing of group movements, and synchronising your own actions with those of others, strengthens the neural circuits involved in rhythm. Our ancestors would have needed social coordination for activities such as tool-making, hunting and preparing food. Over time, such behaviours may have become overtly rhythmic, since working to a beat helps people to coordinate their actions – just look at the work songs such as sea shanties in our recent musical history. Repetitive, rhythmic movements may also have developed to help groups
resonate emotionally, deepening the social bonds that are crucial for human survival. Studies show that children who dance together are more cooperative in subsequent games. Adults who march, sing or dance as part of a church, army or community group are more likely to work for the good of their group than those who don’t. And when two people bop to a steady beat, they are more likely to rate the other person’s personality as similar to their own than couples who move out of time. Over the millennia, our ability to perceive a beat has expanded our musical horizons far beyond those of Large’s bonobos. Rhythm is in our nature, even if we don’t always display it on the dance floor. Like Snowball, Ronan and the other YouTube boppers, we are born to groove. n David Robson dances to his own beat
HE Remo drum company has provided kits for the Beatles, Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones. But the rock-and-roll antics of a recent group of clients is in a different league. “These guys will sit on a drum, they’ll pee on it, they’ll chew it, they’ll try to pick it apart with their fingers,” says Edward Large. “It really needs to be indestructible.” He’s not wrong. They trashed their first set of bongos within a week – and they hadn’t even played them. But then, they are bonobos. It wasn’t until the company came up with a more robust kit – made from the material used to upholster pick-up trucks – that the beat could start. Like most animals, bonobos don’t share our love of a beautiful melody or exquisite harmonies. But, in recent years, the rudiments of rhythm have been found in a surprisingly diverse menagerie. So Large, a psychologist at the University of Connecticut, wanted to find out whether bonobos would take to the drums. This wasn’t simply for fun. Understanding why some species can tap out a beat but others can’t could reveal the origin of music and shed light on our own journey to becoming the all-singing, all-dancing ape. Charles Darwin described music as our “most mysterious” faculty. He suggested
46 | NewScientist | 20/27 December 2014
it began with a “musical protolanguage” – a kind of vocal mating display akin to birdsong – that eventually diverged into two separate traits: speech and music. Others see music as “beneficial play” – prehistoric brain training that challenges various mental skills, such as memory and the perception of emotion. It has also been described as “auditory cheesecake”, a pleasurable experience that just happens to occur as the result of other mental traits we possess such as pattern recognition. Unfortunately, there has been little evidence to back up any of these ideas. Now a switch in focus to rhythm, rather than pitch and harmony, has changed all that. Researchers have found few universal patterns in the way different musical traditions combine pitches. But rhythm is different – while drumming may not be for everyone, dancing to some kind of beat occurs in almost all musical cultures. What’s more, unlike an understanding of harmony, a sense of rhythm seems to be innate. Play drum tracks to newborn babies whose skulls have been covered with electrodes, and there is a spike in neural activity when a drummer skips a beat, as if they have perceived the rhythm and noticed an error. All of which points to rhythm as one of our most primal musical traits.
GONÇALO VIANA
Which animals were born to dance? David Robson finds out
Even so, other animals weren’t thought to share our sense of rhythm. Aniruddh Patel, now at Tufts University in Massachusetts, was one of the first to question this notion. He suspected that complex communication set us on the path to music, reasoning that speech relies on the same connections between auditory and motor areas of the brain that produce rhythmic movement. Although no other species has language, some are capable of flexible, learned vocalisations. If Patel was right, these creatures – which include songbirds, cetaceans and parrots – should all have a sense of rhythm. In 2009, Patel saw the perfect opportunity to test the idea when a colleague emailed him a link to a YouTube sensation called Snowball. In the video, the sulphur-crested cockatoo could be seen rocking his body in time to the Backstreet Boys’ song Everybody (Backstreet’s Back). Patel emailed the bird’s owner, Irena Schulz, and together they showed that Snowball could also bob his head in time to versions of the song that had been accelerated or slowed down. Patel was delighted. “I saw it opening up a lot of future research,” he says.
“The bonobos trashed their first set of bongos within a week” And he was right. Soon, Adena Schachner and her colleagues at Harvard University were combing YouTube for more dancing animals. They found signs of rhythm in 14 other species capable of vocal learning, including macaws, parakeets and Asian elephants. A further 500 videos showed animals with limited vocalisation, such as dogs, ducks and owls, moving to music but failing to keep time, strengthening Patel’s hypothesis. But last year, the first notes of discord began to sound. First came Ronan, a young sea lion at the Long Marine Laboratory at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Sea lions aren’t thought to be vocal learners. However, after a year of training, Ronan could easily match Snowball in a dance-off. Besides bopping to Everybody, she shimmied her way through Earth, Wind and Fire’s Boogie > 20/27 December 2014 | NewScientist | 47
Wonderland – a more difficult task, given the many tempo changes within the song. Despite the challenges, it seemed to be her favourite tune. “With Everybody, she soon got irritated and quit,” says her trainer Peter Cook. “But when we gave her Boogie Wonderland she just hit it and didn’t get tired. She still loves it, to this day.”
Then primates got in on the act. Our closest relatives all have a very limited repertoire of calls. Nevertheless, in 2013, Japanese researchers reported that a chimp called Ai had learned to tap a keyboard in time to a simple backing track. And this February, Large announced exciting results from the bonobos at Jacksonville Zoo and Gardens in Florida. When Large set up his drum kit and began to jam in a walkway between the bonobo enclosures, he attracted an enthusiastic audience. “They came and sat around us to listen in silence. It was rapt attention, and when we stopped they all started screaming for more.” After some coaxing, two bonobos eventually started to drum along with researchers and, in tests around their preferred tempo – which reached a whopping 278 beats per minute – they kept to the beat in about 40 per cent of trials. What are we to make of these results? Patel isn’t giving up on his idea. The bulk of animals with a sense of rhythm are still vocal learners, he points out. The bonobos only synchronised with a single drumbeat, not complicated, multilayered music. He admits that Ronan’s dancing is intriguing, but argues that sea lions may be more loquacious than we realise given that there are very few studies of their vocalisation. Most other researchers suspect there is a spectrum of abilities – and that vocal learning may be only one of many factors that imbue some species with the ability to beat time. For instance, there may also be a link between a sense of rhythm and social behaviour – especially the need to coordinate actions. In other words, rhythm acts as a kind of social glue. Ronan’s grooves certainly seem to support this idea; sea lions often swim in packs to help them flush out their prey. 48 | NewScientist | 20/27 December 2014
Main: Steven Kazlowski/NPL/REX; left bottom: Jonathan Bird/Getty; left top: birdlovers only
Beat generation
Can you spot which one is the dad dancer?
Likewise, bonobos and chimps both live in relatively large groups that require individuals to evaluate and respond to the actions of others. Perhaps predicting the timing of group movements, and synchronising your own actions with those of others, strengthens the neural circuits involved in rhythm. Our ancestors would have needed social coordination for activities such as tool-making, hunting and preparing food. Over time, such behaviours may have become overtly rhythmic, since working to a beat helps people to coordinate their actions – just look at the work songs such as sea shanties in our recent musical history. Repetitive, rhythmic movements may also have developed to help groups
resonate emotionally, deepening the social bonds that are crucial for human survival. Studies show that children who dance together are more cooperative in subsequent games. Adults who march, sing or dance as part of a church, army or community group are more likely to work for the good of their group than those who don’t. And when two people bop to a steady beat, they are more likely to rate the other person’s personality as similar to their own than couples who move out of time. Over the millennia, our ability to perceive a beat has expanded our musical horizons far beyond those of Large’s bonobos. Rhythm is in our nature, even if we don’t always display it on the dance floor. Like Snowball, Ronan and the other YouTube boppers, we are born to groove. n David Robson dances to his own beat