Chimpanzee drumming: a spontaneous performance with characteristics of human musical drumming.

ABSTRACT: Despite the quintessential role that music plays in human societies by enabling us to release and share emotions with others, traces of its evolutionary origins in other species remain scarce. Drumming like humans whilst producing music is practically unheard of in our most closely related species, the great apes. Although beating on tree roots and body parts does occur in these species, it has, musically speaking, little in common with human drumming. Researchers suggest that for manual beating in great apes to be compared to human drumming, it should at least be structurally even, a necessary quality to elicit entrainment (beat induction in others). Here we report an episode of spontaneous drumming by a captive chimpanzee that approaches the structural and contextual characteristics usua

SUBMITTER: Dufour V 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4469965 | biostudies-literature | 2015 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature