Rooks (Corvus frugilegus) can show spontaneous vocal flexibility when exposed to dynamically changing rhythmic sounds.

ABSTRACT: Musicality is the predisposition to process and produce music. In human beings, processing and producing music often involves entrainment, the ability to synchronise behaviour to external auditory rhythms. Most non-human primates have limited entrainment skills; its search in other taxa has shown cases of entrainment much more advanced than any non-human primate in a few taxa, among which birds. Finding convergently-evolved entrainment abilities in several species may highlight shared evolutionary origins. Here, we investigate spontaneous vocal entrainment in rooks, a social corvid, using non-biologically relevant stimuli. We exposed individual rooks to sound sequences varying in tempo and metrical structure, and tested the effect of these two manipulations on temporal adjustments in their

SUBMITTER: Martin K 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12855304 | biostudies-literature | 2026 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature