Wild chimpanzees are able to drum rhythmically and the drumming they produce shares some rhythmic properties with human music, a new study has found.
With an absence of drum kits at their disposal, chimps across East and West Africa beat their hands and feet on the surfaces of huge tree roots that form large flat buttresses. Their drumming is a form of communication and a way to express dominance, rather than a form of musical expression.
“Chimpanzee drumming is incredibly impressive to see and hear,” Professor Catherine Hobaiter, a primatologist at the University of St Andrews.
“The resonance of each hit or beat is so powerful their drums can carry for well over a kilometre, and they sometimes even leap from one buttress to another.
"Their tempo is so fast they move almost in a blur. Each drum is quite short, sometimes just a few seconds, but they do drum several times in a row, especially when waiting or traveling.”
“The regular fast rhythm can sound like some rock drummers,” adds Vesta Eleuteri, Biology PhD candidate at the University of Vienna, who conducted the research. “The drumming patterns are not repeated as long as in human musical drumming, so unfortunately one would not really feel like dancing to them.”
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The authors gathered a unique new dataset of chimpanzee-drumming from rainforests and savannah-woodlands across Africa, with drumming from 11 communities across six different populations on the eastern and western sides of the continent recorded over several decades, including eastern chimps in Uganda and Tanzania and western chimps in Senegal, Guinea and Côte d’Ivoire.
The data was then coded manually with an acoustic program called Praat by Vesta Eleuteri and colleague Wytse Wilhelm.
“I’d love to know if chimpanzees had an aesthetic appreciation for their drums,” says Hobaiter.
“We do know that they’re fussy about their drumming trees. They like hardwood trees that seem to resonate well, transmitting their drums really long distances. But they also sometimes drum on softwoods - in human instruments, those woods make more of a warm fuzzy sound, so perhaps they are paying attention to timber or tone.
"They don’t ‘dance’ when drumming but they do produce amazing ‘dance-like’ responses to big thunderstorms or waterfalls, which are also quite rhythmic.”
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The study was a partnership between the University of St Andrews, the University of Vienna, and the Sapienza University of Rome, and built on a previous study that showed every chimpanzee has their own unique drumming style, and that drumming helps keep others in their group updated about their location and what they’re up to.
Researchers wanted to understand if chimpanzees living in different groups had different drumming styles and if their drumming was rhythmic, as in human music.
The latest findings, published in Current Biology, show that chimpanzee subspecies living on the different sides of Africa drum with different rhythms.
“Chimps from East Africa like to alternate short and long hit intervals, while chimps from West Africa like to drum with more regularly-spaced hits,” Eleuteri explains, the regional differences suggesting chimps learn from or are influenced by their fellow chimp drummers in the local music ‘scene’.
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“Rhythm’s at the heart of human social behaviour - music, dance, poetry, song, conversation… and it’s a ‘universal’, found around the world in all cultures, so it was surprising we hadn’t found any evidence for the capacity to produce rhythmic signals in chimpanzees,” says Hobaiter.
“Work with chimps in captivity even suggested they might have a hard time with rhythm, so we were really excited to find not only the evidence that wild chimpanzees have rhythmic structure in their drumming, but that, like us, they use different rhythms. It tells us that the building blocks for using basic rhythm in our social behaviour were likely around long before humans were human.”
Main image: adult male eastern chimpanzee of the Sonso community in the Budongo Forest (Uganda) producing a pant-hoot call. Credit: Adrian Soldati
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