They sound like trumpets, or bagpipes, or laments… the extraordinary thing is that the songs of the indris lemurs of Madagascar have a rhythm, a rhythm of their own and that until now, was considered exclusive, of birds and humans
The researchers recorded songs from twenty groups of indri (39 animals) that live in their natural habitat, an entire discography.
lemurs Indri They are extraordinary singers (remember there are no monkeys in Madagascar and the closest are the lemurs). Researchers from the universities of Turin, Lyon / Saint-Étienne and the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen have studied in detail the singing of the indris, the ‘singing primates’ of Madagascar. It’s a hypnotic song. After their analysis, they found that their songs have rhythm, as in human compositions or birdsong.
Songbirds share a human sense of rhythm, but it is a rare feature in non-human mammals.
An international research team led by senior researchers Marco Gamba from the University of Turin and Andrea Ravignani MPI began to find musical abilities in primates.
To find out if nonhuman mammals have a sense of rhythm, the team decided to study one of the few “singing” primates, the lemur. indri indri , in critical danger.
Researchers wanted to know if indri songs have a rhythm categorical, a ‘rhythmic universal’ found in human musical cultures. Rhythm is categorical when the intervals between sounds are exactly the same length (1:1) or twice (1:2) tempo. This kind of rhythm makes a song easily recognizable, even if it is sung at different speeds. Would indri songs show this “exclusively human” rhythm?
Recording Lemur Songs
The researchers recorded songs from twenty groups of indri (39 animals) that lived in their natural habitat.
Over a 12-year period, researchers from Turin visited the rainforest of Madagascar to collaborate with a local primate study group. The researchers recorded songs from twenty groups of indri (39 animals) that lived in their natural habitat.
Members of an Indri family group tend to sing together, in harmonized duets and choirs. The team found that the indri songs had the classic rhythmic categories (both 1:1 and 1:2), as well as the typical ‘ritardando’ or slowdown found in various musical traditions. The male and female songs had a different tempo but showed the same rhythm.
According to first author Chiara de Gregorio and her colleagues, this is the first evidence of a “rhythmic universal” in a non-human mammal. But why should another primate produce categorical “music-like” rhythms? The ability may have evolved independently among the “singing” species, as the last common ancestor between humans and Indri lived 77.5 million years ago. Rhythm can make producing and processing music easier, or even learning it.
Endangered species
“Categorical rhythms are just one of the six universals identified so far,” explains Ravignani. “We would like to look for evidence for others, including an underlying ‘repetitive’ rhythm and a hierarchical organization of rhythms, in indri and other species.” The authors encourage other researchers to collect data on indri and other endangered species “before it’s too late to witness their impressive singing demonstrations.”