Chimp’s part ‘building blocks of musical rhythm’ with people

Musicality may have emerged in a common ancestor of chimpanzee and humans, as both species share similarities in how they drum.

Catherine Hobaiter at the University of St. Andrews, UK, and her colleagues examine 371 examples of drums from two of Africa’s four chimpanze single: The western chimpanzee (Pan Troglodytes Verus) and the Eastern Sjimpanse (Pan Troglodytes Schweinfurthii).

They use their hands and feet to produce fast-brand drums, often on buttress roots and mainly when resting while traveling or under threat screens.

Hobaits say that while chimpanzians regularly drums, rainforests are really difficult places to conduct studies, and for some of the population it has taken decades to collect the data.

Eventually, the researchers found that Chimp’s drums are much faster than most people. “Longget drum we registered was over 5 seconds, while the shortet was less than 0.1 seconds,” says Hobaiter. “But chimpanzees will also repeat these drums bouts several times, especially when they travel.”

Despite the difference between chimpanzee and human drums, chimpanzees show some of the “core building blocks for human musical rhythm,” says team member Vesta Eleuteri at the University of Vienna, Austria.

“The drums of rhythm as opposed to randomly, and they use a typical rhythm observed across musical cultures called Isocrony, finding hits that are regularly distributed, such as crossing a watch,” she says. “We also found the two Eastern and Western Chimpanze Subspections that live on the opposite sides of Africa drum with different rhythms.

She says that eastern sluts change short and long spaces between their drum hits, while western jimpanzees even hold them. These chimpanzees also drums faster, use more hits and start drumming earlier in their distinctive mortgage-hoot call.

Miguel Llorente at the University of Girona in Spain says the idea that different subsections are different drum styles is fascinating. “It opens the door to think of these patterns not only as individual quirks, but potentially as cultural different in how groups use drums as a communicative tool.”

We already know that rhythm is fundamental to human social behavior – whether in music and dancing or in back and forth of a conversation, says Hobaiter. “We do not believe that chimpanzes show the refinement of modern human musical rhythms. But this is the first time we have been able to show that they share the same rhythmic building blocks, making it likely that the rhythm was part of our social when they became human.”

“Until recently, it was claimed that rhythmicity was unique to humans,” says Gisela Kaplan at the University of New England, Australia. “We now have plenty of evidence that this is not the case.”