Can Birds Perceive Rhythmic Patterns? A Review and Experiments on a Songbird and a Parrot Species

Abstract

While humans can easily entrain their behavior with the beat in music, this ability is rare among animals. Yet, comparative studies in non-human species are needed if we want to understand how and why this ability evolved. Entrainment requires two abilities: (1) recognizing the regularity in the auditory stimulus and (2) the ability to adjust the own motor output to the perceived pattern. It has been suggested that beat perception and entrainment are linked to the ability for vocal learning. The presence of some bird species showing beat induction, and also the existence of vocal learning as well as vocal non-learning bird taxa, make them relevant models for comparative research on rhythm perception and its link to vocal learning. Also, some bird vocalizations show strong regularity in rhythmic structure, suggesting that birds might perceive rhythmic structures. In this paper we review the available experimental evidence for the perception of regularity and rhythms by birds, like the ability to distinguish regular from irregular stimuli over tempo transformations and report data from new experiments. While some species show a limited ability to detect regularity, most evidence suggests that birds attend primarily to absolute and not relative timing of patterns and to local features of stimuli. We conclude that, apart from some large parrot species, there is limited evidence for beat and regularity perception among birds and that the link to vocal learning is unclear. We next report the new experiments in which zebra finches and budgerigars (both vocal learners) were first trained to distinguish a regular from an irregular pattern of beats and then tested on various tempo transformations of these stimuli. The results showed that both species reduced the discrimination after tempo transformations. This suggests that, as was found in earlier studies, they attended mainly to local temporal features of the stimuli, and not to their overall regularity. However, some individuals of both species showed an additional sensitivity to the more global pattern if some local features were left unchanged. Altogether our study indicates both between and within species variation, in which birds attend to a mixture of local and to global rhythmic features.

On the biological basis of musicality

“…50 More recent studies have questioned an explicit link between vocal learning and beat perception 32,51 or have suggested at least a graded scale in avian species. 21 Some bird species appear to attend more strongly to specific local features of the individual stimuli (e.g., the interval between two onsets) rather than the overall regularity (or isochrony) of the stimuli, a main feature attended to by human listeners. 52 These findings seem to call for a reexamination of the nature and mechanisms underlying rhythmic cognition and its core components, such as isochrony and beat perception.…”

Musicality as an Upbeat to Music: Introduction and Research Agenda

“…Potential candidates for the basic components of musicality that have been proposed in the recent literature are relative pitch (e.g., contour and interval analysis; Justus & Hutsler, 2005;Trehub, 2003), regularity and beat perception (Honing, 2012;ten Cate et al, 2016), tonal encoding of pitch (Hoeschele, Cook, Guillette, Hahn, & Sturdy, 2014;Peretz & Coltheart, 2003), and metrical encoding of rhythm (Fitch, 2013b;Winkler, Háden, Ladinig, Sziller, & Honing, 2009). Some of these musical traits may be common to humans and other species, and others might be uniquely human (see figure 1.4).…”

“…With regard to rhythmic cognition in primates, the empirical evidence Honing et al, under review; With regard to rhythmic cognition in birds, the literature remains partial and divided. Initially a causal link between vocal learning and beat perception and synchronization was proposed (Patel, 2006;, associated with evolutionary modifications to the basal ganglia that play a key role in mediating a link between auditory input and motor output during learning (Petkov & Jarvis, 2014); however, other studies have questioned such an explicit link Wilson & Cook, 2016) or suggested at least a graded scale in avian species (ten Cate et al, 2016). Some species attend more strongly to specific local features of the individual stimuli (e.g., the exact duration of time intervals) rather than the overall regularity of the stimuli, a main feature human listeners attend to; van der Aa, Honing, & ten Cate, 2015).…”

Animals Make Music: A Look at Non-Human Musical Expression

“…However, their results, such as evidence of the entrainment of animals to music stimuli [17,18], have great significance for our study. These kinds of test devices have enabled scientists to gather evidence that animal species have auditory skills and musical talents, and examine how these skills work [15,16].…”

“…Therefore, the music should be attuned to the animals' auditory skills. Studies have shown that non-human species also have musical skills [14][15][16] and display entrainment to auditory stimuli [17,18]. Animal species such as grey parrots, cockatoos, elephants, primates, pigeons, and carps have been found to be able to discriminate between different composers or different genres, prefer music to silence, or move in rhythmic synchronicity to the musical beat [10,14,[17][18][19].…”