Indri is a lemur, a primate with opposite thumbs; a short tail; and round, tufted, teddy bear-like ears. They share a branch of the evolutionary tree with humans, but our paths diverged about 60 million years ago. However, one striking similarity remains: Indris is one of the few mammals that can sing. Family groups form choirs in the treetops of their rainforest home in Madagascar; Their voices echoed for miles. Those songs — which biologist Andrea Ravignani describes as sounding like a cross between some jamming jazz trumpets, a humpback whale, and a scream — are also unique songs other than those. Man-made singing is structured with a predictable, regular rhythm.
Actually, the indri rhythm can be alike Like human rhythms, says Ravignani, who studies bioacoustics at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. He is part of an international team of researchers with recent newspaper in Current Biology was the first to record rhythms in lemurs.
Analyzing how and when lemur songs use rhythmic structure could help researchers understand music in humans, whose evolutionary purpose remains a mystery. Traits like color vision, bipedal mobility, and extended childhood are all thought to be due to evolutionary pressures favoring carriers of certain genes. But music, which is pervasive across human cultures, is inexplicable. “As a music lover, I am mesmerized by the beauty of music,” says Ravignani. “As a biologist, it’s hard for me to understand why we haven’t found the answer when so many other things are so obvious in human evolution.”
The origin of rhythm – and even the term itself – has been a challenge. “There is no universally accepted definition,” said Anirrudh Patel, a cognitive psychologist at Tufts who was not involved in the lemur study. He points out that rhythm is often confused with rhythm. Both are basic thrusts that make you move your hips or snap your fingers to the beat of the music. But the two are not always synonymous. Think of a Gregorian hymn, no beat but still rhythmic. While a beat is generally a steady, steady beat, a beat is a relationship between events such as notes, clicks, or drum beats.
Patel defines rhythm as the systematic arrangement of events in time. That includes everything from the bouncing oompah-pah notes of a polka tree to the John Cage composed Organ.2/ ASLSP (The Slower The Better), a continuous performance is expected 639 years, where the notes are divided by years of silence.
For decades, scientists thought rhythm perception was a uniquely human capacity until Snowball, a parakeet and YouTube star, entered the scene in 2007. In the viral videos, Snowball touches his claws and nods his head just in time to hit the mark. Backstreet Boys, Queen, and Michael Jackson. When Patel saw these clips, he immediately brought Snowball into his lab and began experimenting to see if these dances were a coincidence or the bird could actually tell the difference. Identify rhythms in songs. Patel’s research shows that this is not an accident. As his team sped up or slowed down to the music, Snowball changed his movements to match.
