Birds Dance to the Beat
Posted by Michael Bradbury in Animals, Discoveries, Featured Articles, The Brain, Video on 05 4th, 2009 | one response
After poring over about 1,000 YouTube videos researchers have discovered that some animals can bebop to the beat. The movie shows three excerpts of videos analyzed in this experiment. Each excerpt is at a tempo different from the original song (Everybody, by the Backstreet Boys; 108.7 beats per minute [bpm]).
The excerpts include synchronized bouts, periods during which Snowball, the cockatoo bobs his head in synchrony with the musical beat for at least 12 consecutive bobs, demonstrating rhythmic animal entrainment.
Aniruddh Patel of The Neurosciences Institute in San Diego first proposed the music connection in 2006. His research can be found in Current Biology.
One Response to “Birds Dance to the Beat”
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I used to volunteer at the Yonkers Racetrack in high school. One stable had a horse that seemed to like some music: when he did, he’d bob his head and shuffle his front hooves. No one taught him this–they just noticed it over time. I saw it once, but it’s been so long ago that I don’t remember the particulars, just that the horse wasn’t paying attention to anyone else, but groovin’ on his own.