A team of scientists in Madagascar studied one of the few “singing” primates, the critically endangered lemur Indri indri.
Songbirds share the human sense of rhythm, but does this musical ability repeat itself in non-human mammals? An international study of critically endangered Indri indri lemurs says yes.
The results are published in the journal Current Biology, in an article signed by scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and the University of Turin, who claim that looking for musical traits in other species helps to understand how rhythmic capacities originated and evolved in humans.
To find out if nonhuman mammals have a sense of rhythm, the team decided to study one of the few “singing” primates in Madagascar, the critically endangered lemur Indri indri.
The researchers wanted to know if indri songs have “categorical rhythms,” that is, universal patterns that seem to be found in all human musical cultures.
Rhythm is categorical when the intervals between sounds are of exactly the same length (1: 1 beat) or twice the length (1: 2 beat).
This type of rhythm makes a song easily recognizable, even if it is sung at different speeds, explains a statement from Max Planck.
For twelve years, the Turin researchers visited the Madagascar rainforest to collaborate with a local primate study group.
There they recorded the songs of twenty groups of indri (39 animals) that lived in their natural habitat.
Singing skills in animals
They found that members of an indri family group often sing together, in harmonized duets and choruses, and found that the songs of these animals had the classical rhythmic categories (both 1: 1 and 1: 2), as well as the typical “ritardando “or slowdown found in various musical traditions.
In addition, they observed that the male and female songs had a different tempo, but showed the same rhythm. According to the first author, Chiara de Gregorio, this is the first proof of this “universal rhythm” in a non-human mammal.
According to the researchers, this ability may have evolved independently among “singing” species, since the last common ancestor between humans and the Indri lived 77.5 million years ago.
The researchers would like to find evidence for other musical patterns in the indri and other species.
In this sense, Andrea Ravignani, from Max Planck, encourages other researchers to collect data on the indri and other endangered animals, “before it is too late to witness their impressive singing demonstrations.” (I)
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