We all experiment tapping the beat of a music, dancing or shaking our head vigorously on a metal music. This behavior, typically human, is not seen in nonhuman animals. Starting to this verdict, researchers tried to understand how and why this behavior exist.
To understand why this effect does exist, researchers put forward the “vocal learning and rhythmic synchronization theory”. This theory stands that only vocal learning species can move their body synchronously to the music’s beat. According to this theory, researchers created a dancing parakeet experiment.
Indeed, they’d like to find a way to make “dance” a parakeet properly on a music beat. To find which parakeet will be their test subject, they searched on YouTube to find relevant parakeets dancing on music. They finally found “Snowball” a white male parakeet which moves synchronously on the music’s beat.
Thus, during the experiment’s set up, they point out limits to struggle in order to get a more standardized and controlled experiment. First, Snowball is a parakeet, it belongs to the parrot’s family and, consequently, he could mimic nonverbal human behavior. Secondly, Snowball have been spotted dancing on only one song, so, its performance might come from a human teaching.
To avoid bias, scholars created a room where any human can interact with the bird, but they might be able to observe it thank to a one-way ice. Then, experimenters played different type of music with a variety of beats per seconds (BPS).
They observed that Snowball moved rhythmically on every music presented to the bird. This result confirms the theory that only vocal learning species can decrypt and move to a beat. But the question that researchers are asking by now is replicability of the results. Indeed, is only Snowball able to move on beats or every animal. They do return on YouTube to check if there are more birds and nonverbal learning animals that might able to move on beats.
By searching they found that their hypothesis is true, animals with language can interpret and dance on beat (i.e. cetaceas, all kind of birds, …). This discovery confirms their hypothesis and show that new datas about the common point with human brain and nonhuman animals brains. More specifically it shows common points with brain organization, hormonals aspects and cognitive responses to stimuli. additionally, this research shows the links between language, kinesthetic aspects of the brain and perception of the music, it might be a new path to explore in order to apprehend the complex links between all the brain’s part and animal cognitive abilities. Finally, this research shows the importance of animal model to understand human behaviors.
Vocabulary:
To put forward: mettre quelque chose ou quelqu’un en avant
A parakeet : une perruche
To struggle : empêcher, contrôler
A parrot : un perroquet
Cetaceas : les cétacés
Patel, A. D., Iversen, J. R., Bregman, M. R., & Schulz, I. (2009). Experimental Evidence for Synchronization to a Musical Beat in a Nonhuman Animal. Current Biology, 19(10), 827‑830. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2009.03.038