Latest news with #Eleuteri
Sinar Daily
17-05-2025
- Science
- Sinar Daily
Do chimpanzees have their own music? Study reveals rhythmic drumming
The idea that ape drumming might hold clues to the origins of human musicality has long fascinated scientists, but collecting enough clean data amid the cacophony of the jungle had, until now, proven elusive. 17 May 2025 07:04pm Like humans, chimpanzees drum with distinct rhythms -- and two subspecies living on opposite sides of Africa have their own signature styles, according to a study published recently in Current Biology. - AFP file photo WASHINGTON - Out west, they groove with fast, evenly spaced beats. In the east, it's more free-form and fluid. Like humans, chimpanzees drum with distinct rhythms -- and two subspecies living on opposite sides of Africa have their own signature styles, according to a study published recently in Current Biology. The idea that ape drumming might hold clues to the origins of human musicality has long fascinated scientists, but collecting enough clean data amid the cacophony of the jungle had, until now, proven elusive. "Finally we've been able to quantify that chimps drum rhythmically -- they don't just randomly drum," lead author Vesta Eleuteri of the University of Vienna told AFP. The findings lend fresh weight to the theory that the raw ingredients of human music were present before our evolutionary split from chimpanzees six million years ago. Previous work showed chimpanzees pound the huge flared buttress roots of rainforest trees to broadcast low frequency booms through dense foliage. Scientists believe these rhythmic signals help transmit information across both short and long distances. For the new study, Eleuteri and colleagues -- including senior authors Catherine Hobaiter of the University of St. Andrews in the UK and Andrea Ravignani of Sapienza University in Rome -- compiled more than a century's worth of observational data. After cutting through the noise, the team focused on 371 high-quality drumming bouts recorded from 11 chimpanzee communities across six populations living in both rainforest and savannah-woodland habitats across eastern and western Africa. Their analysis showed that chimpanzees drum with definitive rhythmic intent -- the timing of their strikes is not random. Distinct differences also emerged between subspecies: western chimpanzees tended to produce more evenly timed beats, while eastern chimpanzees more frequently alternated between shorter and longer intervals. Western chimps also drummed more frequently, kept a quicker tempo, and began drumming earlier in their signature chimp calls, made up of rapid pants and hoots. The researchers do not yet know what is driving the differences -- but they propose that it might signify differences in social dynamics. The western chimps' faster, predictable pulse might promote or be evidence of greater social cohesion, the authors argue, noting that western groups are generally less aggressive toward outsiders. By contrast, the eastern apes' variable rhythms could carry extra nuance -- handy for locating or signalling companions when their parties are more widely dispersed. Next, Hobaiter says she would like to study the data further to understand whether there are intergenerational differences between rhythms within the same groups. "Music is not only a difference between different musical styles, but a musical style like rock or jazz, is itself going to evolve over time," she said. "We're actually going to have to find a way to tease apart group and intergenerational differences to get at that question of whether or not it is socially learned," she said. "Do you have one guy that comes in with a new style and the next generation picks it up?" - AFP
eNCA
10-05-2025
- Science
- eNCA
Jungle music: Chimp drumming reveals building blocks of human rhythm
LONDON - Out west, they groove with fast, evenly spaced beats. In the east, it's more free-form and fluid. Like humans, chimpanzees drum rhythmically -- and two subspecies living on opposite sides of Africa even have their own signature styles, according to a study published in Current Biology. The idea that ape drumming might hold clues to the origins of human musicality has long fascinated scientists, but collecting enough clean data amid the cacophony of the jungle had, until now, proven elusive. "Finally, we've been able to quantify that chimps drum rhythmically -- they don't just randomly drum," lead author Vesta Eleuteri of the University of Vienna told AFP. The findings lend fresh weight to the theory that the raw ingredients of human music were present before our evolutionary split from chimpanzees six million years ago. Previous work showed chimpanzees pound the huge flared buttress roots of rainforest trees to broadcast low‑frequency booms through dense foliage. Scientists believe these rhythmic signals help transmit information across both short and long distances. For the new study, Eleuteri and colleagues -- including senior authors Catherine Hobaiter of the University of St. Andrews in the UK and Andrea Ravignani of Sapienza University in Rome -- compiled more than a century's worth of observational data. After cutting through the noise, the team focused on 371 high-quality drumming bouts recorded from 11 chimpanzee communities across six populations living in both rainforest and savannah-woodland habitats across eastern and western Africa. Their analysis showed that chimpanzees drum with definitive rhythmic intent -- the timing of their strikes is not random. Distinct differences also emerged between subspecies: western chimpanzees tended to produce more evenly timed beats, while eastern chimpanzees more frequently alternated between shorter and longer intervals. Western chimps also drummed more frequently, kept a quicker tempo, and began drumming earlier in their signature chimp calls, made up of rapid pants and hoots. The researchers do not yet know what is driving the differences -- but they propose that it might signify differences in social dynamics. The western chimps' faster, predictable pulse might promote or be evidence of greater social cohesion, the authors argue, noting that western groups are generally less aggressive toward outsiders. By contrast, the eastern apes' variable rhythms could carry extra nuance -- handy for locating or signalling companions when their parties are more widely dispersed. Next, Hobaiter says she would like to study the data further to understand whether there are intergenerational differences between rhythms within the same groups. "Music is not only a difference between different musical styles, but a musical style like rock or jazz, is itself going to evolve over time," she said. "We're actually going to have to find a way to tease apart group and intergenerational differences to get at that question of whether or not it is socially learned," she said. "Do you have one guy that comes in with a new style and the next generation picks it up?"
Yahoo
09-05-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Do chimpanzees have rhythm? Listen to their drumming.
'You feel it in your body when they drum—it's insanely impressive,' says Vesta Eleuteri. She's a cognitive biologist at the University of Vienna who studies chimpanzee drumming and observed over 350 drumming performances like this in five African countries. Chimpanzees in West Africa hold onto trees with their hands while kicking against roots with their feet, emitting powerful sounds that travel long distances, sometimes over a half mile. 'They're so fast sometimes… their hands and feet are a blur,' says Catherine Hobaiter, primatologist at the University of St. Andrews, who was also involved with the research. 'They will jump between the buttresses on these huge rainforest trees and almost dance around them, hitting them with their feet and hands. It's really amazing to see.' Eleuteri and Hobaiter's findings that chimpanzees drum rhythmically on tree roots, and that different groups drum with different styles, was recently published in Current Biology. Their observations suggest drumming is a way to share information with other members of the group. It's a unique mode of communication that humans and chimpanzees share. Scientists think it may have arisen in a common ancestor the two species share. Another new study on some of the same chimpanzees, published in Science Advances, found they combine vocal sounds to convey complex meanings, a communication system which could be a stepping stone between animal communication and human language. Together, these chimpanzee behaviors can help scientists understand how human of music-making and language first developed. 'You've really got the building blocks of the kind of things we've used to make modern music, present long before humans were humans,' says Hobaiter. Rhythmic music-making has long been considered uniquely human, and percussion is one of the earliest forms of human musical expression. Drumming can have different individual and regional styles but typically consists of non-random timing: hits are evenly spaced, aligning to a set rhythm. Eleuteri and Hobaiter's previous research discovered chimpanzees drum on buttress roots—large, wide roots growing above the soi—to send information over long and short distances. Each chimpanzee has their own unique drumming style, and they combine drumming with hooting to share where they are in the forest and what they're doing. Although all animals communicate, humans are considered the only species on Earth known to use language: combining sounds into words, and words into sentences, to create meaning. Other animals like birds vocalize to send messages, and while some species do combine these calls, this behavior is typically limited to a few types of calls and to the context of alerting others to predators. Bonobos, which are closely related to chimpanzees and humans, also use complex combinations, primatologists think the mysterious origins of human language might come from a common ancestor shared by all three species 5 to 7 million years ago. The new drumming study analyzed 371 drumming bouts in 11 chimpanzee communities in Côte d'Ivoire, Guinea, Senegal, Uganda, and Tanzania. 'Until recently, there wasn't a lot of convincing evidence for rhythmic behavior in primates that has any resemblance with human musical rhythm,' Pritty Patel-Grosz, a linguist at the University of Oslo who was not involved in the study but whose research explores rhythmic dancing in gibbons, wrote in an email. '[The] observation that chimpanzee drumming on tree buttresses exhibits properties of human musical behavior is another huge breakthrough.' The same research project studying drumming chimps in Côte d'Ivoire also contributed to the new study on how chimps combine vocalizations. It analyzed over 4,000 recorded sounds from 53 chimpanzees. Calls were connected to specific events: feeding, nesting, approaching, aggression, or predator encounters. Two-call vocalizations were combined to convey more meaning than a simpler call, spanning a range of day-to-day activities: for example, a 'hoo" sound was usually used during feeding and travel, and a 'pant' sound was mostly used during social activities with other chimpanzees, but a combined 'hoo' and 'pant' sound was used during nesting, creating a whole new meaning. 'We expected the system to be versatile, but that was beyond our expectations,' says study author Cédric Girard-Buttoz, evolutionary biologist at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). 'The system has most of the linguistic phenomena we find in language.' Complex chimpanzee vocalizations could represent an evolutionary bridge between more simplistic animal calls and open-ended human language, says Girard-Buttoz. 'Chimpanzee communication may incorporate the seeds of a human-like system,' Patel-Grosz writes of the findings. 'In human cognition, many scholars have been arguing that language and music are closely related, and they may share the same cognitive resources,' wrote Patel-Grosz. For example studies showing the same parts of the brain process language and music. Patel-Grosz proposes further research can better clarify this connection: 'In other words, did chimpanzee vocal communication and chimpanzee rhythmic drumming evolve together, and can this inform our understanding of the evolution of language and music?' 'When investigating the evolution of human language, we usually compare it to the vocal communication of [animals],' says Maël Leroux, evolutionary biologist at University of Rennes, who was not involved in the new studies. 'Human language is not vocal, it's very much multimodal,' a combination of sounds and gestures. That suggests the origins of human language are also multimodal, Leroux says. Different drumming styles were observed in the different communities researchers studied, which may also reflect the variation in human language, says Leroux. Western chimpanzees typically drummed more often and faster, while eastern chimpanzees drum more slowly and start drumming later in their hooting. Hobaiter thinks these differences are shaped by the different social structures seen between the eastern and western groups—eastern chimpanzees are more aggressive and hierarchical, and western chimpanzees are more cohesive and egalitarian—and Hobaiter points out that since rhythm is central to human sociality, dance, and speech, our social behaviors may have been tied to how we developed rhythm too. 'This is the kind of science that wakes us up to the fact that every single population of chimpanzees is worth conserving and preserving,' says Hobaiter. 'We're starting to recognize that they might have cultures in their communication, in their rhythm, in their social behavior… if you lose a group, you lose the unique culture that goes with it.'
National Geographic
09-05-2025
- Science
- National Geographic
Do chimpanzees have rhythm? Listen to their drumming.
New research on the rhythmic drumming and complex calls of chimpanzees could point scientists to the origins of language. Chimpanzees drum and make calls to communicate. Two new studies have found they drum to send message across large distances and can create complex vocalizations. Photograph By Ronan Donovan 'You feel it in your body when they drum—it's insanely impressive,' says Vesta Eleuteri. She's a cognitive biologist at the University of Vienna who studies chimpanzee drumming and observed over 350 drumming performances like this in five African countries. Chimpanzees in West Africa hold onto trees with their hands while kicking against roots with their feet, emitting powerful sounds that travel long distances, sometimes over a half mile. 'They're so fast sometimes… their hands and feet are a blur,' says Catherine Hobaiter, primatologist at the University of St. Andrews, who was also involved with the research. 'They will jump between the buttresses on these huge rainforest trees and almost dance around them, hitting them with their feet and hands. It's really amazing to see.' Eleuteri and Hobaiter's findings that chimpanzees drum rhythmically on tree roots, and that different groups drum with different styles, was recently published in Current Biology. Their observations suggest drumming is a way to share information with other members of the group. It's a unique mode of communication that humans and chimpanzees share. Scientists think it may have arisen in a common ancestor the two species share. Another new study on some of the same chimpanzees, published in Science Advances, found they combine vocal sounds to convey complex meanings, a communication system which could be a stepping stone between animal communication and human language. Together, these chimpanzee behaviors can help scientists understand how human of music-making and language first developed. 'You've really got the building blocks of the kind of things we've used to make modern music, present long before humans were humans,' says Hobaiter. Rhythmic music-making has long been considered uniquely human, and percussion is one of the earliest forms of human musical expression. Drumming can have different individual and regional styles but typically consists of non-random timing: hits are evenly spaced, aligning to a set rhythm. Eleuteri and Hobaiter's previous research discovered chimpanzees drum on buttress roots—large, wide roots growing above the soi—to send information over long and short distances. Each chimpanzee has their own unique drumming style, and they combine drumming with hooting to share where they are in the forest and what they're doing. Although all animals communicate, humans are considered the only species on Earth known to use language: combining sounds into words, and words into sentences, to create meaning. Other animals like birds vocalize to send messages, and while some species do combine these calls, this behavior is typically limited to a few types of calls and to the context of alerting others to predators. Bonobos, which are closely related to chimpanzees and humans, also use complex combinations, primatologists think the mysterious origins of human language might come from a common ancestor shared by all three species 5 to 7 million years ago. The new drumming study analyzed 371 drumming bouts in 11 chimpanzee communities in Côte d'Ivoire, Guinea, Senegal, Uganda, and Tanzania. 'Until recently, there wasn't a lot of convincing evidence for rhythmic behavior in primates that has any resemblance with human musical rhythm,' Pritty Patel-Grosz, a linguist at the University of Oslo who was not involved in the study but whose research explores rhythmic dancing in gibbons, wrote in an email. '[The] observation that chimpanzee drumming on tree buttresses exhibits properties of human musical behavior is another huge breakthrough.' The same research project studying drumming chimps in Côte d'Ivoire also contributed to the new study on how chimps combine vocalizations. It analyzed over 4,000 recorded sounds from 53 chimpanzees. Calls were connected to specific events: feeding, nesting, approaching, aggression, or predator encounters. Two-call vocalizations were combined to convey more meaning than a simpler call, spanning a range of day-to-day activities: for example, a 'hoo" sound was usually used during feeding and travel, and a 'pant' sound was mostly used during social activities with other chimpanzees, but a combined 'hoo' and 'pant' sound was used during nesting, creating a whole new meaning. 'We expected the system to be versatile, but that was beyond our expectations,' says study author Cédric Girard-Buttoz, evolutionary biologist at the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). 'The system has most of the linguistic phenomena we find in language.' Complex chimpanzee vocalizations could represent an evolutionary bridge between more simplistic animal calls and open-ended human language, says Girard-Buttoz. 'Chimpanzee communication may incorporate the seeds of a human-like system,' Patel-Grosz writes of the findings. Shared ancestors in rhythm and language 'In human cognition, many scholars have been arguing that language and music are closely related, and they may share the same cognitive resources,' wrote Patel-Grosz. For example studies showing the same parts of the brain process language and music. Patel-Grosz proposes further research can better clarify this connection: 'In other words, did chimpanzee vocal communication and chimpanzee rhythmic drumming evolve together, and can this inform our understanding of the evolution of language and music?' 'When investigating the evolution of human language, we usually compare it to the vocal communication of [animals],' says Maël Leroux, evolutionary biologist at University of Rennes, who was not involved in the new studies. 'Human language is not vocal, it's very much multimodal,' a combination of sounds and gestures. That suggests the origins of human language are also multimodal, Leroux says. Different drumming styles were observed in the different communities researchers studied, which may also reflect the variation in human language, says Leroux. Western chimpanzees typically drummed more often and faster, while eastern chimpanzees drum more slowly and start drumming later in their hooting. Hobaiter thinks these differences are shaped by the different social structures seen between the eastern and western groups—eastern chimpanzees are more aggressive and hierarchical, and western chimpanzees are more cohesive and egalitarian—and Hobaiter points out that since rhythm is central to human sociality, dance, and speech, our social behaviors may have been tied to how we developed rhythm too. 'This is the kind of science that wakes us up to the fact that every single population of chimpanzees is worth conserving and preserving,' says Hobaiter. 'We're starting to recognize that they might have cultures in their communication, in their rhythm, in their social behavior… if you lose a group, you lose the unique culture that goes with it.'
Yahoo
09-05-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Chimpanzees can keep a rhythmic beat
Not to be outdone by Ronan the beat-keeping sea lion or woodpeckers in the forest, some chimpanzees are also able to keep a beat and use regular spacing between drum hits. Over 300 observations of two distinct subspecies–eastern and western chimpanzees–show that the primates can drum with distinguishable rhythms. The findings are detailed in a study published May 9 in the Cell Press journal Current Biology and suggest that the building blocks of our species' ability to write music likely arose in a common ancestor that Homo sapiens share with chimpanzees. 'Based on our previous work, we expected that western chimpanzees would use more hits and drums more quickly than eastern chimpanzees,' Vesta Eleuteri, a study co-author and cognitive biologist at the University of Vienna in Austria, said in a statement. 'But we didn't expect to see such clear differences in rhythm or to find that their drumming rhythms shared such clear similarities with human music.' [ Related: Chimp conversations can take on human-like chaos. ] A 2022 study from the same research team showed that chimpanzees can drum on the buttress roots of trees. Drumming on these large tree roots that grow above the soil can produce low frequency sounds. The team suggests that these percussive patterns are used to send information to other chimps over both long and short distances. 'Our previous study showed that each chimpanzee has their own unique drumming style and that drumming helps to keep others in their group updated about where they are and what they're doing—a sort of way to check in across the rainforest,' Eleuteri said. 'What we didn't know was whether chimpanzees living in different groups have different drumming styles and whether their drumming is rhythmic, like in human music.' In this new study, Eleuteri joined forces with Catherine Hobaiter of the University of St. Andrews in the UK and Andrea Ravignani of Sapienza University in Italy, as well as other chimpanzee researchers from around the world. They studied 371 drumming bouts in 11 wild chimpanzee communities, including six populations and two subspecies. They tested whether chimps drum rhythmically or show regional variation in drumming and how it integrates with their loud and structurally complex vocalizations called 'pant-hoots.' They analyzed the drum patterns and found that chimpanzees can drum with rhythm. The timing of their hits is often easily spaced and does not appear to be random. There were also different patterns in the Eastern subspecies (Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii) and Western subspecies (Pan troglodytes verus). Western chimpanzees used evenly spaced hits and hit their 'drums' more, using a faster tempo, and integrated the drumming into their pant-hoot vocalizations earlier. Eastern chimpanzees more frequently alternated between hits and at shorter and longer time intervals. 'Making music is a fundamental part of what it means to be human—but we don't know for how long we have been making music,' says Hobaiter. 'Showing that chimpanzees share some of the fundamental properties of human musical rhythm in their drumming is a really exciting step in understanding when and how we evolved this skill. Our findings suggest that our ability to drum rhythmically may have existed long before we were human.'
