Orangutan with drum beats
In February 2014, the famous American remo drum skin manufacturing company came to some new customers. These customers will sit on the drum, they will urinate on the drum, they will bite the drum, they will try to tear the drum apart with their hands. In less than a week, the drums were broken by these guys before they could be used in their performances. The staff could only stare dryly, because these guys were baby chimpanzees. In desperation, Remo made a stronger drum out of material from the truck's saddle, so he could continue his drumming attempts. So why are they so willing to let the baby chimpanzees spoil the drums?
Like other animals, baby chimpanzees don't understand pitch and timbre, but recent studies have found that many animals, such as parrots, can understand some of the rhythms. So, can baby chimpanzees understand the rhythm?To find out this question, Edward Raz, a psychologist at the University of Connecticut in the United States, designed the experiment to find out if baby chimpanzees could play drums. This study is not only deceptively interesting, but it also helps to unravel the mystery of the origin of human beings.
Pronunciation and rhythm
It seems to be a human instinct to understand the rhythm, and all people dance to certain rhythms. Playing drums to newborn babies and monitoring their brain waves, when the drummer deliberately skips a drum beat, the baby's brain waves will spike, indicating that they understand the rhythm and detect the mistakes inside.
And what about other animals?Scientists used to believe that no other animal, except humans, understood rhythm. But Andre Patel, a professor of biology at Tufts University in the United States, doesn't think all animals don't understand. He speculates that complex linguistic communication is the foundation of humanity's path to **, because the connections in the brain responsible for language are similar to the connections that produce rhythm. Although other species do not have a language, there are some species that have strong articulation skills, and articulatory ability is the basis of language. So Patel speculated that articulating animals such as songbirds, whales, and parrots would also understand some rhythms.
In 2009, Patel finally had a good opportunity to test his views. One of his colleagues sent him a link to a sunflower cockatoo called Snowball that danced to the Backstreet Boys' song "Everybody." Patel immediately contacted the parrot's owner, and they studied it together, discovering that if the frequency of the song was changed, the snowball would also light his head with the change.
Later, researchers at Harvard University collected more dancing animals**, including macaws, parakeets and Asian elephants, and found that these dancing animals had better pronunciation skills. The other more than 500 shows that those animals with limited pronunciation functions, such as dogs, ducks and owls, will also jump a few times with **, but it is difficult to continue. This survey confirms Patel's hypothesis.
The emergence of special cases
However, other researchers have since found that some animals with poor pronunciation skills can also understand rhythm well. The first exception is a sea lion named "Lonan". It is generally believed that the sea lion is not strong in pronunciation, but after a year of training, "Luonan" will easily dance to the rhythm of **. In addition to dancing to the music of "Everybody", it will also dance to another more complex song, "Boogie Wonderland", which has many tempo variations, and it is very difficult to dance to the beat of it, but the sea lion can keep up with the beat.
Another exception comes from primates. Despite their close proximity to humans, their articulation is limited, but their sense of rhythm is not far behind. In the experiment mentioned at the beginning of this article, Raz played a drum kit in a hallway outside the chimpanzee enclosure, which immediately attracted the attention of the chimpanzee. They gathered around Raz to sit down and listen quietly, engrossed. When the Raz stops playing, they will also howl and ask for more playing. Then, after some coaxing, Raz got the two baby chimpanzees to learn to play drums with the researchers. When hitting their favorite beat (278 beats per minute), the baby chimpanzees hit the correct rhythm 40% of the time.
Rhythmic movement and social behavior
So how do you explain the two exceptions above?Patel still insists that these two exceptions are not enough to refute his arguments. Because baby chimpanzees will only understand a single drum beat, not a complex one. However, he was also puzzled by the strong sense of rhythm of the sea lions, and he thought that the sea lions' pronunciation skills might be very strong, but they were not yet known to us.
However, most researchers believe that the ability to pronounce sounds is only one factor in order to understand rhythm, and that there should be other factors. For example, there should be some connection between the ability to understand rhythm and social behavior – especially when activities need to be coordinated. In other words, rhythmic movement is a social signal. Sea lions are proof of this. Sea lions often swim in packs, coming together to chase away their prey. Similarly, baby chimpanzees live in groups, which requires each individual to understand and respond to the actions of other peers. Perhaps, when they move in harmony in groups, they enhance the neural circuits that process rhythms.
Our ancestors also needed to move in harmony to make tools, hunt, prepare food, and so on. Over time, people will find that rhythm helps them coordinate their own behavior with other people. If you think about the scene of sailors shouting at the labor horn to sail the ship in the past, you will understand.
In addition, rhythm will also make the emotions within the group better communicated. Studies have shown that children who dance together can complete tasks more coordinatedly. Adults who like to sing, dance, or march together in social groups such as churches, the military, etc., are more willing to do something beneficial for the group.
In this way, many animals, like us humans, are natural dancers, but our human beings' ** and dance ability have evolved stronger.