Xinhua News Agency, Beijing, October 27 ,2017 -- On the 27th, the "Reference News" published an article by the Effie News Agency entitled "The Big Lemur Also Understands the Rhythm of Music." The summary is as follows:
Songbirds have the same sense of rhythm as humans, so is this musical ability also present in non-human mammals? An international study of critically endangered lemurs gave a positive answer.
The results were published in the American journal Contemporary Biology. The study, conducted by scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands and the University of Turin in Italy, notes that finding musical properties in other species helps to understand how human rhythmic abilities originated and evolved.
To see if non-human mammals have a sense of rhythm, the team decided to study one of the few "singing" primates in Madagascar, the critically endangered giant lemur.
The researchers wondered whether the "songs" sung by the lemurs had "categorical rhythms," a universal pattern found in all human musical cultures. Categorical rhythms exist when the intervals between sounds have exactly the same duration or double the duration.
The Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics explained in a statement that this rhythm makes songs easy to recognize, even when sung at different speeds. For 12 years, researchers from the University of Turin have visited the Heated Belt Rainforest in Madagas, collaborating with a local primate research team. There, they recorded "songs" from groups of 20 large lemurs living in their natural habitat.
The researchers found that members of the great lemur family often sang in harmonious duet and chorus forms, and found that the "songs" sung by these animals had classic rhythmic categories, as well as the "slow down" typical of some musical traditions. In addition, they observed that male and female lemurs had different "song" beats, but showed the same rhythm.
According to chiara de Gregorio, the study's first author, this is the first evidence of "rhythmic universality" in non-human mammals. The researchers say the ability may have evolved independently among "singing" species, as the last common ancestor between humans and lemurs lived 77.5 million years ago.
The researchers hope to find evidence of the existence of other musical patterns in large lemurs and other species.
In this sense, Andrea Lavinani, an expert at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, encouraged researchers to collect data on large lemurs and other endangered animals "lest it be too late to want to hear their impressive singing performances."
Source: Xinhua Net