Schruth DM, Templeton CN, Holman DJ, Smith EA. The origins of musicality in the motion of primates.
AMERICAN JOURNAL OF BIOLOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY 2024;
184:e24891. [PMID:
38180286 DOI:
10.1002/ajpa.24891]
[Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 06/02/2022] [Revised: 11/08/2023] [Accepted: 11/28/2023] [Indexed: 01/06/2024]
Abstract
Animals communicate acoustically to report location, identity, and emotive state to conspecifics. Acoustic signals can also function as displays to potential mates and as territorial advertisement. Music and song are terms often reserved only for humans and birds, but elements of both forms of acoustic display are also found in non-human primates. While culture, bonding, and side-effects all factor into the emergence of musicality, biophysical insights into what might be signaled by specific acoustic features are less well understood.
OBJECTIVES
Here we probe the origins of musicality by evaluating the links between musical features (structural complexity, rhythm, interval, and tone) and a variety of potential ecological drivers of its evolution across primate species. Alongside other hypothesized causes (e.g. territoriality, sexual selection), we evaluated the hypothesis that perilous arboreal locomotion might favor musical calling in primates as a signal of capacities underlying spatio-temporal precision in motor tasks.
MATERIALS AND METHODS
We used musical features found in spectrographs of vocalizations of 58 primate species and corresponding measures of locomotion, diet, ranging, and mating. Leveraging phylogenetic information helped us impute missing data and control for relatedness of species while selecting among candidate multivariate regression models.
RESULTS
Results indicated that rapid inter-substrate arboreal locomotion is highly correlated with several metrics of music-like signaling. Diet, alongside mate-choice and range size, emerged as factors that also correlated with complex calling patterns.
DISCUSSION
These results support the hypothesis that musical calling may function as a signal, to neighbors or potential mates, of accuracy in landing on relatively narrow targets.
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