Proceedings of the 10th Convention of the
European Acoustics Association
Forum Acusticum 2023


Politecnico di Torino
Torino, Italy
September 11 - 15, 2023





Session: A02-05: Terrestrial bio-acoustics - Part I
Date: Wednesday 13 September 2023
Time: 18:00 - 18:20
Title: Rhythmic categories across primate vocal displays
Author(s): M. Gamba, University of Turin, Dept. Life Sciences and Systems Biology, Via Accademia Albertina 13, 10123 Torino, Italy
T. Raimondi, University of Turin, Dept. Life Sciences and Systems Biology, Via Accademia Albertina 13, 10123 Torino, Italy
C. De Gregorio, University of Turin, Dept. Life Sciences and Systems Biology, Via Accademia Albertina 13, 10123 Torino, Italy
D. Valente, University of Turin, Dept. Life Sciences and Systems Biology, Via Accademia Albertina 13, 10123 Torino, Italy
F. Carugati, University of Turin, Dept. Life Sciences and Systems Biology, Via Accademia Albertina 13, 10123 Torino, Italy
W. Cristiano, University of Turin, Dept. Life Sciences and Systems Biology, Via Accademia Albertina 13, 10123 Torino, Italy
V. Ferrario, University of Turin, Dept. Life Sciences and Systems Biology, Via Accademia Albertina 13, 10123 Torino, Italy
V. Torti, University of Turin, Dept. Life Sciences and Systems Biology, Via Accademia Albertina 13, 10123 Torino, Italy
L. Favaro, University of Turin, Dept. Life Sciences and Systems Biology, Via Accademia Albertina 13, 10123 Torino, Italy
O. Friard, University of Turin, Dept. Life Sciences and Systems Biology, Via Accademia Albertina 13, 10123 Torino, Italy
C. Giacoma, University of Turin, Dept. Life Sciences and Systems Biology, Via Accademia Albertina 13, 10123 Torino, Italy
A. Ravignani, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Comparative Bioacoustics Group, Wundtlaan 1, 6525 XD Nijmegen, Netherlands
Pages: 3971-3974
DOI: https://www.doi.org/10.61782/fa.2023.0958
PDF: https://dael.euracoustics.org/confs/fa2023/data/articles/000958.pdf
Conference proceedings
Abstract

The last few years have revealed that several species may share the building blocks of Musicality with humans. The recognition of these building blocks (e.g., rhythm, frequency variation) was a necessary impetus for a new round of studies investigating rhythmic variation in animal vocal displays. Those animals closest to us phylogenetically and that, as humans, can emit songs aroused particular interest. Singing primates are a small group of primate species that produce modulated songs ranging from tens to thousands of vocal units. Previous studies showed that the indri, the only singing lemur, is currently the only known species that perform duet and choruses showing multiple rhythmic categories, as seen in human music. Rhythmic categories occur when temporal intervals between note onsets are not uniformly distributed, and rhythms with a small integer ratio between these values are typical of human music. Besides indris, white-handed gibbons and three crested gibbon species showed a prominent rhythmic category corresponding to a single small integer ratio, isochrony. This study reviews previous evidence on the co-occurrence of rhythmic categories in primates and focuses on the prospects for a comparative, multimodal study of rhythmicity in this clade.