Shockingly few animals can actually keep a beat
When I watched StarTalk Radio host Neil deGrasse Tyson interview Ray Kurzweil for Tech Insider's Innovators series, I was struck by Kurzweil's claim that - excluding humans - "no other animal can keep a beat."
Surely humans aren't the only animals with rhythm.
In nature, bees do a "waggle dance" to map flowers. Birds sing elaborate mating calls.
And the internet has no shortage of animals bouncing along to human music, like this parrot jumping up and down to Flo Rida. Or this fluffy dog that seems to bob its head in time with a guitar melody:
These animal movements don't look random; it seems like they're in sync with a beat.
But are they actually recognizing, analyzing, and then reacting to the rhythm in the complex way that humans do, like when we dance or sing along to a song?
The key test for establishing if animals can jam to music is to introduce a tempo change. By that measure shockingly few animals can keep even a basic rhythm. In fact, until a few years ago, it was unclear whether any animals had rhythm at all.
That changed with Snowball the cockatoo.
Snowball was brought to a bird rescue center in Indiana, called Bird Lovers Only, with a Backstreet Boys CD. When workers at the center played the CD for the bird, he danced along with the music.
A video of him dancing to "Everybody" went viral after the center's director, Irena Schulz, filmed him bobbing his head and tapping his feet on the back of a chair:
Aniruddh Patel, then a neurobiologist at the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, reached out to the bird center to study Snowball. Schulz was formerly a molecular biologist and agreed to help.
Along with two other researchers, Patel and Schulz played Snowball 11 different versions "Everybody," sped up or slowed down by up to 20% (without altering the pitch of the song). The cockatoo only followed the tempo changes about 25% of the time, but in a 2009 study the scientists assert this was not merely by chance - Snowball could keep a rhythm and dance to a beat, he just wasn't very good at it.
So if some parrots have rudimentary rhythm, what about other creatures?
Bonobo chimps have shown some inclination to follow a changing beat, but solid evidence is scant, since researchers who spend extended periods of time with apes can easily over-humanize them.
Other than that, there haven't been any non-human mammals proven capable of following tempo changes, with one exception: a California sea lion found stranded on a highway.
Ronan the sea lion preferred Earth Wind & Fire's "Boogie Wonderland," but also bobbed her head to Snowball's favorite, "Everybody," as well as a metronome playing various speeds.
These findings are definitely not conclusive, and Snowball the cockatoo and Ronan the sea lion may just be remarkable outliers. But studying which animals can keep a beat could be valuable for learning why we evolved our own rhythmic abilities. It certainly suggests a strong link in our brains between the areas that affect movement and hearing.
Whether it's a lucky byproduct of vocal mimicry (which would support the view that only humans and parrots can keep a beat), or that rhythm serves an evolutionary purpose of its own (which would explain why non-mimicking animals like Ronan can do it), is still unknown.
Patel told National Geographic that rhythm may have be advantageous for humans because it helps us bond.
"Moving in synchrony makes people feel connected socially and emotionally," he told the magazine.