Animals Ain't Got Rhythm, but (Some) Humans Do

Animals ain't got Rhythm, but (some) Humans do.

Do animals have music? Do dogs appreciate piano playing? Typically not. Do even birds, who sing so well, engage in choruses or appreciate songs not their own? Not really. And to hear jays and crows going at it can make one want to run and hide. Insects can carry on very rhythmic thrums of specific kinds, even in choruses, such as the crickets. But the mental bandwidth is such as to prohibit consideration of this monotonous output as music.

Sound is certainly important to virtually all birds and mammals, but the coding is static, not flexible, the meaning very limited. It conveys intense emotion, just not in what we understand typically as music, which includes rhythm as an essential element. So while we regard our own music as quite primal- a direct communication of emotion prior to its elaboration as speech or its perception by other modes- it combines primal emotion with something that is not universal at all: the language of music.

A recent review looked at the capacity of non-humans to learn and appreciate rhythm. It cites "... what biologist Tecumseh Fitch has called “the paradox of rhythm.” As Fitch notes, “Periodicity and entrainment seem to be among the most basic features of living things, yet the human ability (and proclivity) to entrain our motor output to auditory stimuli appears to be very rare.”"

"While the rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta) could successfully listen to two metronome clicks and then reproduce the same interval by tapping twice on a key, they had great difficulty learning to tap in synchrony with a metronome of several beats. Specifically, each monkey took over a year of training to learn the metronome task, and when tested, their taps were always a few hundred ms after each metronome click rather than aligned with it."

The author thinks that our evolution of speech was intimately connected to musical and rhythmic ability:

"Specifically, I proposed the “vocal learning and rhythmic synchronization hypothesis” (henceforth, “vocal learning hypothesis”), which suggests that the capacity to synchronize with a musical beat resulted from changes in brain structure driven by the evolution of complex vocal learning. Complex vocal learning is learning to produce complex vocal signals based on auditory experience and sensory feedback. This is a rare trait in nature: most animals (including all nonhuman primates) have a small set of instinctive vocalizations which they can modify in only modest ways in terms of their acoustic patterning."

Parrots provide some comparative evidence for this. They can both learn complex and responsive vocalization, and can keep time with a tempo from a metronome or music, unlike our primate cousins, who are virtually incapable of doing so, even after lengthy training. But parrots do so poorly, (not having music in the wild), so humans remain unique not only in our complexity of music, but in the very basic ability to enjoy and propagate rhythm. The author speculates a bit about the brain anatomy of this, pointing out what are thought to be relevant fiber pathways that are elaborated in humans, but this is all quite schematic to date.

One might hypothesize that for wild animals, keeping rhythm impairs their ability to stay vigilent, one of their highest goals. Entrainment is a sort of hypnosis, which we humans seem to love, along with other mind-altering practices such as drugs of many descriptions. We have given up a measure of individual vigilence in favor of the imaginative and social benefits of daydreaming, music-making, dancing, novel-writing ... many forms of social glue and mental exercise that have higher-level benefits.

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