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Parrots have got rhythm, studies find
April 30, 2009
Courtesy Cell Press
and World Science staff
It seems people aren’t the only ones who’ve got rhythm. The cockatoo
"Snowball" dances.
Scientists say they have confirmed through studies and through analyses of YouTube videos that some types of parrots—and possibly an elephant—can also bob their heads, tap their feet, and sway their bodies along to a musical beat.
The findings come in two reports published online April 30 in the research journal
Current Biology.
“We’ve discovered a cockatoo that dances to the beat of human music,” said Aniruddh Patel of The Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, Calif., lead author of one of the studies. “Using a controlled experiment, we’ve shown that if the music speeds up or slows down across a wide range, he adjusts the tempo of his dancing to stay synchronized to the beat.” The bird, named Snowball, has a particular predilection for the song “Everybody” by the Backstreet Boys, he
added; it also stamps its feet fiercely to Queen’s “Another One
Bites the Dust.”
“For a long time, people have thought that the ability to move to a beat was unique to humans,” said Adena
Schachner of Harvard University, who led the other study. “After all, there is no convincing evidence that our closest relatives, chimpanzees and other apes, can keep a beat, and there is similarly no evidence that our pet dogs and cats can” do so. Birds in the wild aren’t known to move in time with sounds, Patel added.
Researchers now suspect that the parrots’ ability is traceable to another capacity they share with people: vocal learning or mimicry. Indeed,
Schachner’s group searched YouTube for videos of dancing animals. Of more than 1,000 videos that turned up, only those of vocal mimics – representing 14 parrot species and one species of elephant – showed evidence that they could really get into the groove.
That dovetails with a notion proposed by Patel that “entrainment” or sustained movement to a musical beat relies on the brain circuitry for complex vocal learning, which requires a tight link between auditory and motor circuits in the brain, the scientists said.
“A natural question about these results is whether they generalize to other parrots, or more broadly, to other vocal-learning species,” including songbirds, dolphins, elephants, and pinnipeds, a group including walruses and seals, Patel said.
The findings in birds may offer new insight into humans’ relationship to music. “Why humans produce and enjoy music is an evolutionary puzzle,” Schachner’s team wrote. Debate continues over the idea that human musical capacity did not arise as a s result of direct evolutionary pressures, but indirectly, as a byproduct of pressures to improve other abilities.
“By supporting the idea that entrainment emerged as a byproduct of vocal mimicry in avian species, the current findings lend plausibility to the idea that the human entrainment capacity evolved as a byproduct of our capacity for vocal mimicry,” the researchers wrote.
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It seems people aren’t the only ones who’ve got rhythm. Scientists say they have confirmed through studies and through analyses of YouTube videos that some types of parrots—and possibly an elephant—can also bob their heads, tap their feet, and sway their bodies along to a musical beat. The findings come in two reports published online April 30 in the research journal Current Biology. “We’ve discovered a cockatoo that dances to the beat of human music,” said Aniruddh Patel of The Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, Calif., lead author of one of the studies. “Using a controlled experiment, we’ve shown that if the music speeds up or slows down across a wide range, he adjusts the tempo of his dancing to stay synchronized to the beat.” The bird, named Snowball, has a particular predilection for the song “Everybody” by the Backstreet Boys, he added. “For a long time, people have thought that the ability to move to a beat was unique to humans,” said Adena Schachner of Harvard University, who led the other study. “After all, there is no convincing evidence that our closest relatives, chimpanzees and other apes, can keep a beat, and there is similarly no evidence that our pet dogs and cats can” do so. Birds in the wild aren’t known to move in time with sounds, Patel added. Researchers now suspect that the parrots’ ability is traceable to another capacity they share with people: vocal learning or mimicry. Indeed, Schachner’s group searched YouTube for videos of dancing animals. Of more than 1,000 videos that turned up, only those of vocal mimics – representing 14 parrot species and one species of elephant – showed evidence that they could really get into the groove. That dovetails with a notion proposed by Patel that “entrainment” or sustained movement to a musical beat relies on the brain circuitry for complex vocal learning, which requires a tight link between auditory and motor circuits in the brain, the scientists said. “A natural question about these results is whether they generalize to other parrots, or more broadly, to other vocal-learning species,” including songbirds, dolphins, elephants, and pinnipeds, a group including walruses and seals, Patel said. The findings in birds may offer new insight into humans’ relationship to music. “Why humans produce and enjoy music is an evolutionary puzzle,” Schachner’s team wrote. Debate continues over the idea that human musical capacity did not arise as a s result of direct evolutionary pressures, but indirectly, as a byproduct of pressures to improve other abilities. “By supporting the idea that entrainment emerged as a byproduct of vocal mimicry in avian species, the current findings lend plausibility to the idea that the human entrainment capacity evolved as a byproduct of our capacity for vocal mimicry,” the researchers wrote.