Looking for musical abilities in primates

Songbirds share the human sense of rhythm, but it is a rare trait in non-human mammals. An international research team led by senior investigators Marco Gamba from the University of Turin and MPI's Andrea Ravignani set out to look for musical abilities in primates. "There is longstanding interest in understanding how human musicality evolved, but musicality is not restricted to humans," says Ravignani. "Looking for musical features in other species allows us to build an 'evolutionary tree' of musical traits, and understand how rhythm capacities originated and evolved in humans."